


Look at the Stars

by Hours_and_Days



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, F/M, Han Solo Lives, I Make Stuff Up, Kylo Ren Redemption, POV Kylo Ren, POV Rey (Star Wars), Rape mentioned disapprovingly, Soul-Searching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-06-10 15:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6962902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hours_and_Days/pseuds/Hours_and_Days
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story begins in the forest on Takodana, and imagines a very different interrogation, with very different consequences for everyone.</p><p>"How could she explain to Leia what had happened when she did not understand it herself? She tried to remember what had been said, how she had found herself beneath him on his cloak, and then could remember only how she had felt there, the cloak soft and warm on her back, his body heavy against her, his face betraying an awkward tenderness she wouldn't have thought him capable of, his fingers tracing her lips and touching her hair."</p><p>Would love feedback!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Prologue

The forest known only as the Great Forest, on the southernmost continent of Takodana, crept down the side of a mountain, divided to embrace the lake at its base, then knit itself back together and traveled south, stopping only at the edge of a cliff that overlooked the sea. Maz Kanata's had stood on the shore of the lake for a thousand years, a turreted stone fortress used, in part, as a tavern. First-time visitors to Maz's typically laughed when they entered, because the contrast between the small, beery interior and the enormous, impassive, flag-draped exterior was so stark. Maz liked it this way, because it meant that new customers invariably entered her establishment laughing. Just as predictable were their questions. "What have you got squirrelled away in the rest of this place? Treasure?" "Heaps!" she would reply, her eyes sparkling behind her thick glasses. Or, "Why do you need a whole goddamn castle to put a bar in?" To this she usually said, "One day, I'll know why. Then I'll tell you!"

On this day, First Order tie fighters hummed around Maz Kanata's like devouring insects, strafing the ancient stone. Transports landed and spit out stormtroopers firing blasters, and her customers ran for cover or ran for their ships.

The pirate, Captain Ithano, had made her place a regular stop because, he said, it was indestructible. It wasn't, as it turned out. But Captain Ithano was there that day. Captain Ithano, with his promise of safety in the Outer Rim, had kept the former stormtrooper from the girl just long enough. He would not be in time. *He* would find her and take her. And as she saw in a bright flash the consequences of *him* finding the droid first, of *him* never meeting her, Maz knew after a thousand years why she had needed the whole goddamn castle.

 

Chapter 1

The lake at the foot of the mountain was a soft grey, and very still, like an unblinking eye staring into the humid air. It reflected the metal shapes streaking across the sky, noiselessly rendering their smoke and gunfire on its placid surface.

Kylo Ren, similarly unperturbed by the shrieking sounds of the assault and the unfortunate but not unexpected defense of Kanata's castle by the Resistance, prowled through the forest, searching for the girl. He anticipated little difficulty in getting the information he wanted, but he was growing impatient. The woods were vast. Hills surged and fell, and the forest floor was studded with mossy boulders, some the size of small houses, remnants of an ancient landslide. The noise from the battle made listening for footfalls impossible.

He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. He let the Dark Force wander through the woods, seeking. It seemed to slither through the trees, caressing birds and busy forest animals with cold fingers, momentarily dimming their little Lights only to be dismissed with an angry flap or affronted shiver. Moments ticked by and he forced himself to wait, and to focus. For nearly a minute he felt nothing, then a sudden, hard slam that shook him physically, as if he had run at full speed into one of the boulders. The stirrings he had been feeling, the sense that something he believed dead was reemerging: they had not misled him. The girl was strong with the Force. 

He recovered himself, and turned east. The sounds of the seige—explosions, shouting, staccato gunfire—grew more intense, a thicket of noise that suggested the battle was reaching its climax, and that the victor would soon be decided. He didn't care much who prevailed in this little skirmish; the map was all that mattered and he would have that shortly. However strong she was, he was unquestionably, overwhelmingly, stronger.

Then, coming around a squarish rock some twelve feet high, he saw the girl directly in front of him, at the other end of a narrow corridor of boulders.

He extended his light saber. The dull, angry drone of the weapon had its intended effect: her head snapped around, eyes wide.

*

Rey reacted quickly, raised her blaster, and fired, but the hooded, masked thing moving rapidly toward her parried the shots with a red saber and was not deterred. A pit opened inside her and terror, slimy and taloned, slid out of the pit and into her stomach. She turned and ran on legs that felt as if they had been detached at the joints and too-hastily reassembled. At the top of a rise she stopped, turned, and raised the blaster again. But before she could pull the trigger her arm was forcibly lowered, immobilized along with the rest of her limbs.

The man with the red saber—if it was a man—walked slowly toward her. He was tall, and shrouded in black as if raised from a tomb. His face was covered by a metal mask, the top half a series of tightly curving horizontal grooves slashed by a narrow opening through which he could presumably see, but which did not render his eyes visible. The lower half was a smooth, curved, unbroken expanse that protruded slightly outward, like the broad snout of a beast whose mouth is not where it should be. Terror clawed through her motionless body, shrieking for her to raise her arm, to run. It ripped through her guts, clogged her lungs, pounded at her heart. 

He stopped his advance. Slowly, he raised the light saber. Its point hovered six inches from her throat. His arm did not quiver so much as a millimeter, but the saber glitched and crackled with its own malevolent energy.

"Girl," he said, quietly, almost conversationally, "Where is the droid?"

"I won't tell you," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

He moved closer to her and the saber's point slid beneath her earlobe and hovered just a hair away from her neck. So that its quivering blade touched her and then snapped away. So that it almost burned, almost cut. Rey hardly dared to breathe.

"My apologies," he said. "I couldn't quite hear you."

She could smell her hair beginning to scorch. Rey swallowed down the terror as it climbed the back of her throat. She looked into the dark slit of the mask. "I won't. Tell you."

"You will."

"I know what you'll do with that map," she said, trying to strengthen herself with the sound of her own voice still speaking, her own mouth still drawing breath. "I won't tell you where it is."

There was a pause. "How do you know what I'll do with the map?"

Rey realized with alarm that she had made a mistake. "I don't—"

"You've seen the map."

"No, I haven't, I—"

"You're lying," he said, sounding pleased. "I don't need the droid. I have you." He retracted his light saber and returned it to a hidden pocket in his cloak.

"No—I don't—" He reached out his hand and all was dark.

*

Kylo Ren bent down, lifted the girl, and began carrying her through the woods to his ship. He was anticipating entering her mind with more than a little pleasure. He had never interrogated someone so strong with the Light; it would be much more interesting than opening all of the tedious, "secret" hiding places on a BB unit. The Light side did not excel at espionage, though this was perhaps to be expected.

Nearly out of the forest, Ren looked down at his captive. Her face was full of angles, insouciant, but graceful. Undeniably beautiful. Her eyes were closed now, but a moment ago they had blazed at him, promising to defy him unto death. And yet, he thought, feeling pleased with himself, here she was insensate against his chest. He liked the way she felt in his arms: light, small, and pliable.

Usually, he didn't give much thought to women at all: they were distractions. But now, he was surprised to find himself thinking that her beauty and strength made her uniquely worthy of his attention and that he would like to see admiration in her eyes, instead of defiance. The feeling, once sparked, flared quickly. Why should he not have the admiration—the adoration, even—of this girl? His grandfather had been loved by a beautiful woman; even his father had, and he was not half—not even a tenth—the man Vader had been.

But he smothered this line of thought as quickly as he had allowed it to arise; it was unfocusing his mind. Snoke regularly and rightly upbraided him for his rashness, his failures in judgment, his inability to bring stillness to his mind. The death of Skywalker, the ascendancy of the First Order, the elevation of his Master to overlordship of a new Galactic Empire: these were his aims; these his interests.

He looked away from her face, gentle and long-eyelashed in repose, and tried to picture the way she'd looked when he had drawn his saber: afraid. She would fear him, and she would be made to serve the purposes of his Master.

And yet, the small voice suggesting that both his master and his mission might be better served by dropping this girl and resuming his search for the droid was efficiently muzzled before it fully emerged into his consciousness.

Ren reached his command shuttle. Ignoring the explosions and gunfire that still tore through the air around him, he stalked up the ramp and snapped an order at the pilot. In a few moments, they were en route to Starkiller base.

*

Rey awoke to find herself strapped to a metal chair in a dim room. A small table, and a second chair—for the interrogator, she surmised—were the only other furnishings. Panels of switches and lights lined the black walls, which sulked, only half-visible, in the gloom. Where was she? On a ship, probably. Had she been in the woods hours ago? A day? She struggled against the metal restraints around her arms and legs—then she heard the hydraulic hiss of a door opening behind her and she was immediately still.

His steps into the room were quick, and in a moment he stood before her, lean, tall, and draped in black. Masked in the same terrible dark metal helmet. She forced brave words from her throat: "I didn't think you needed restraints to bind me."

He looked at her, then his voice was quiet when he spoke: "You're afraid of me."

The mask muffled his voice somewhat, but Rey could hear the self-satisfaction in his tone and it made her angry. "Well, then, maybe," she said acidly, "you should take off your scary mask."

He was silent, and motionless, for a moment. Then he reached up, clicked a release on the helmet, and pulled it off.

He was young—she had not expected that, for some reason. His eyes were dark brown, and black-lashed. He had heavy eyebrows and thick black hair, a prominent and crooked nose like a duke's, and a full-lipped, almost pouting mouth that looked as if it had forgotten how to smile a long time ago, if it had ever known. She stared at him, not able to reconcile the face with the mask and feeling strangely calmed by his appearance. He was, after all, only a man and not a monster.

His gaze as he looked back at her was open and intense and she felt her chest tighten. But before she could interpret this feeling he had closed his eyes and she began to feel a slight pressure. It wasn't in her skull, but that was the closest approximation of where it was. A pressure, then an opening.

"Show me the map," he said.

*

Usually when Ren Pushed someone, he felt a tension, then a slight release, an opening. It revealed to him a cramped, dark, and spiky place: a mind rigid with fear. He had only to unleash his will in a flood to create an unbearable sensation that his victims mistook for choking or suffocation. If a man (it was usually a man) resisted long enough he would kill himself, unaware that his lungs were actually functioning normally, that he could easily draw breath if only he were able to resist the suggestion—a term that carried the wrong connotations but which was nonetheless apt—that he could not. Most of them quickly produced the information Ren wanted, desperately hurling it up out of the murky depths. An image—of a traitor, a secret base, the location of a valuable artifact—would stretch itself out before his mind like a spiderweb. A few words would creak and vibrate in the void: a name, a code, a confession. Ren had grown comfortable in the dark of his victims' terror, extracting what he needed like ripping a circuit from a droid.

But when he entered the girl, he felt his mind adrift in a bright, blue, infinite sky. It seemed, he thought, disquieted, that she really wasn't afraid.

And, as he had anticipated, she was powerful with the Light. He could feel the warm energy of the Force illuminating her. He wondered if she knew how powerful she was. Probably not: the vast energy seemed restless and uncontrolled. There was no stillpoint, no center. But endless golden Light. Retrieving the map might be more difficult than he had thought. He felt uncertain and blamed her for it.

He focused his will and a few memories flickered in the infinite blue: an old woman scrubbing a piece of metal, Maz Kanata's wizened orange face telling her something about someone not coming back. Incredibly: the face of FN-2187, looking back at her as he walked out a door. That would do it. "He walked out of your life as quickly as he walked into it," he said. "You shouldn't be surprised. He's a traitor." He paused, and felt the sadness welling within her. He pushed her further and saw a wall of hashmarks, a shelter made of a wrecked ship. A shelter for one. "But you aren't surprised. Are you?" He opened his eyes and searched her face, leaning in close as if to examine her newly erupting tears, as if he had never seen tears before. "I've never met anyone more alone than I am. Until you."

She turned her head to the side, refusing his gaze, lips trembling, and suddenly the satisfaction he took in finding such a lovely, bone-deep fault line evaporated.

"I get no pleasure from this," he said abruptly, "Just show me the map."

She turned her face back to him and her eyes narrowed. Clearly, she didn't believe that he wasn't enjoying himself. What would she say? He watched curiously as the expression on her face transformed, slowly, from one of misery to one of determination. Her lips were slightly apart and she looked as if she were concentrating. Then he felt it: she was Pushing back.

Shocked, he tried to block her entry into his mind, but she was strong and he found that he was failing to keep her out.

"Ben Solo?" she gasped. "You're Han Solo's son!"

He jerked backwards, as if to make himself harder for her to reach. "Han Solo's son is dead," he spat out. "My name is Kylo Ren."

*

His gloved hand snapped out as if to physically push her back. Rey sat up as far as the chair would allow, straining toward him instead of away, gritting her teeth. She pushed harder, seeking and finding his weak spots without knowing how she was doing it. "You think your soldiers should be clones," she said slowly, still concentrating, looking for the reason. The vicious edge in her voice was dulled by her astonishment. "Because you don't think they should be taken from their families. My god," she said, the edge sharpening again. "You are an absolute sham!"

*

Instead of resisting, he focused all of his energy on Pushing deeper into her, looking for whatever would hurt her the most. A moment of breathtaking pain, a feeling of being split down the middle: then he was inside. He was breathing heavily, disoriented—and floating.


	2. Chapter 2

His will came at her in a wave of overwhelming force, threatening to sweep her not just out of his mind but, she feared, out of her own. She imagined piercing the wave, cutting through it, and the pressure building in her mind changed to a feeling of being squeezed, throttled—the pain was nearly unbearable—and then it released, all at once. She hadn't realized that her eyes were closed until she opened them, and when she did, she stood gaping, trying to catch her breath and scarcely believing what she saw.

She stood alone on an island of jagged grey rock. It was small, no more than a fraction of a mile across, and higher than it was wide. She was perched on the breezy highpoint of the island, and she could see that it towered far above the surface of an ocean that stretched as far as she could see in every direction, unbroken by any other landmass. The island was devoid of any green plant or skittering creature, but its range of greys, from nearly white to silver to soft blue slate, made it beautiful. Visible only after a double-take, a few low, crumbling buildings, their uneven bricks apparently quarried from the same rock on which they stood, were huddled on a terrace below her.

More astonishing than the island was the ocean that encircled it, which was so dark as to be nearly black, but translucent, as if very pure water had been suffused with ink or smoke. It rose and fell in little swells, gently lapping the island, and as it moved against the island and away again, it seemed to glitter, as if it were populated at every depth by tiny creatures armored in diamonds. Looking up, Rey saw a sky shrouded with silver clouds. They seemed to be hiding and diffusing a source of light cooler and whiter than the golden sunlight of a typical star.

This, she understood, was the man who was holding her captive. Kylo Ren. This was the man Finn had feared so much that he was willing to run all the way to the Outer Rim. She had somehow entered his mind—really entered it, in some way that she could not fathom even as she understood it to be true. This vivid sense of dislocation, she supposed, was typical?

Apart from the strangeness of finding herself suddenly free, breathing clear air in a place that seemed too lovely to be inside the man Finn feared, the man who wore that mask, Rey had known the instant she opened her eyes that she had seen the place—or, something very much like it—before. Often when she couldn't sleep she would comfort herself by imagining an island in the middle of a vast sea—and while her island was verdant and her sea was blue-green and filled with fat, speckled fish, the shape of the island was the same and the rocks were the same and the sound and the smell of the sea. She would imagine swimming in the ocean with Naya, squealing as fish bumped dumbly against their legs, lazing together in the sun and talking, always talking, or singing songs they would make up together. Naya had loved to sing as a little girl; it was one of the only things Rey remembered about her sister.

How did he have this place in his mind? Or, how did she?

Her own mind, meanwhile, seemed somehow to be both with her and far away, stretched—or just bilocated. She felt his presence; it was shadowy and cool but it didn't hurt. Perhaps that was only temporary. She wondered what he saw. More urgently: what he could do.

Perhaps she should find out what she could do. Quickly and nimbly, she clambered the long way down to sea level, to the edge of the island. Once there, she knelt, and tentatively, she placed one hand, palm down, on the undulating surface of the glittering ocean.

She felt nothing. Disappointed, she withdrew her hand. Then she thought perhaps a little more commitment was required. She plunged both arms into the water.

*

Without foothold in her warm, sunlit sky, Ren wished he had left the girl in the woods and gone after the droid. How had this happened? He was in her mind, but really inside it—what did that mean? As for his own mind: he felt as if he had packed up his executive functions and abandoned the rest of himself to a new tenant. The girl's presence was warm, but not comfortable: agitating. What was she doing? He wanted her out. He wanted her to stay.

He could not want her to stay. Ren tried to refocus, to gather his will and yank what he wanted up out of wherever she had hidden it. He needed to be finished with this girl: he felt compromised, off-balance. But he found to his horror that he was unable to summon the Force: somehow, he was utterly neutralized. It had to be her—what had she done? He cursed and struck out wildly at the Light with both hands.

To his surprise, the knuckles of his left hand rapped painfully against some hard object. The object bellowed a hollow clang in protest, and a voice said, "Ouch! Gah!" In the next moment, Ren found himself sitting down on something solid, the girl seated next to him. She was frowning and rubbing her knuckles, having apparently just banged them against the object on which they both sat. Which was, he realized, looking down, the massive wreck of an Imperial Star Destroyer, partially buried in sand and still faintly echoing deep in its bowels.

Ren looked around and recognized the landscape of Jakku immediately: a bleak, seemingly limitless expanse of dull yellow sand, flat except where the little granules had, with the help of a baking wind, heaped themselves up into dunes as if hoping they might from a greater height spot an end to the monotony somewhere in the distance. Other wrecks dotted the landscape, if it could be called that. Jakku, he thought with disgust, was not fit to be the graveyard of his grandfather's Empire.

He turned his attention back to the girl. Judging from her appearance, this memory was at most a couple of years old. But while he understood that what he was seeing was indeed a memory, this was like no other memory Ren had ever experienced. Usually, the images he saw when he Pushed someone were dim and flickering, like a hologram—and similarly limited in scope and size. He would watch them, these quivering, stilted pictures, and listen for the tremulous echoes of the memory. This deep and visceral immersion in someone else's experience was unprecedented in his. He had not known this was possible, and he wondered whether anyone else did.

What, though, of any consequence, was the girl remembering? Having successfully sent a grotesque scorpion-like creature skittering away from her leg—the cause of the rapped knuckles—she just sat, eating a little piece of some foul-looking bread and staring out at the horizon, eyes narrowed against the glare. He realized that he wasn't inclined to complain. Having entirely free, close-up visual access to her—an awake, moving version of her—while she could see nothing of him, not even his mask and cloak, was deeply gratifying. He touched every inch of her with his eyes, watched the movements of her lips and jaw as she chewed inelegantly. He saw her swat a strand of hair from her face, then use her long fingers to pick every crumb of bread out of her other palm. It occurred to him that she must be hungry to be so careful with that miserable excuse for food. Suddenly he spat: for just a moment, he could taste the bread, coarse and sour.

Then he saw that the direction of her gaze had shifted. She was looking up, far up into the sky, where a little dark dot was growing bigger. The dot became a ship as proximity filled in detail, and Ren watched her track the ship as it appeared to land someplace a few miles west. "Okay," she said aloud, her voice sounding a little too plucky. "Let's go check it out."

The girl picked up a hunk of metal and trailing wires, climbed down from the wreck, and shoved her treasure into a net slung across the side of a battered red landspeeder. She swung a leg over the speeder and Ren did the same, climbing up behind her. She took off with a jerk and while he knew instinctively that he could not fall off because she hadn't, he just as instinctively threw his arms around her waist to steady himself. He left them there. She was so small and warm, but also sinewy, hard, and not so much svelte as underfed. Safe in his nonexistence he held her very tightly, his fury at her exposure of his weakness forgotten in the deepening pleasure of her physical presence. He pressed his chest against her back, forcing himself to keep his hands still, his arms around her waist. He was profoundly disappointed when she slowed and stopped the speeder; without his input, his arms released her so she could disembark as the memory dictated.

Perhaps fifty yards in front of them was Niima Outpost, a large, dusty pagoda full of junk with a few ramshackle tents slouched around it. Not far from the structure ten or twelve ships squatted in a cluster. They all looked to Ren as if they would soon be rotting on some other planet if anyone was stupid enough to try to fly them off of Jakku, but they were clearly landed, rather than crashed.

With an uncomfortable jolt, he noticed that his father's ship was there. 

The newly arrived ship was the farthest away. A ramp had descended and figures were emerging.

Then he heard the girl speak. "Mother," she whispered. In another moment she was alight, radiant with happiness. "Father! Naya!" Ren looked at the ship. A ramp had descended and three figures had emerged: a man, a woman, and a girl around Rey's age. When he saw them, Ren felt a wild leap of joy, an explosion of bright hopeful warmth that accelerated his pulse and pulled a wide, laughing grin onto his face. Horrified, he shook himself to dispel the feeling.

The girl ran madly toward the ship, shouting and laughing and sobbing. Ren followed at a slower pace, frowning, pushing her euphoria away with effort. Fifteen or twenty yards from the disembarked passengers, who were heading towards the outpost and paying no attention to her, she abruptly stopped running and just stood, breathing heavily. A sweaty man with a pair of curling horns emerging from his forehead shuffled out of a nearby tent and called, "How's it, Rey?" before turning from her, unzipping stained pants, and pissing into the sand. "Alright, Toph," she replied. She took another long look at the family that wasn't hers, and turned back toward the speeder. Her face showed nothingness, rather than nothing, pain that couldn't be felt without risk of annihilation.

Then the family and the outpost and the shipyard faded into the sand, and the wrecks faded into the sand, and at last the girl faded, too. The sand remained, silent, and slowly shifting in the hot wind.

Ren stood alone, feeling as though his insides were being slowly hollowed and sucked dry, as if he would clang when struck.

*

Rey still felt nothing. The water felt like water. She swished her hands around, wondering if this Kylo Ren was as powerful as she had thought. 

Then, seemingly of their own accord, her hands scooped up some of the dark water and threw it in her face.

Gasping, she wiped her eyes with the hem of her tunic. When she looked up again, she was kneeling on the grassy bank of a narrow river with two men kneeling beside her splashing their own faces. One she didn't recognize, though this was hardly a surprise. He was short, with sandy hair and similarly colored clothes. The other she recognized immediately. He was tall, but perhaps not yet a man, after all. The boy was fifteen or sixteen years old, shirtless above grey pants, with a narrow chest and long, spindly arms. His features seemed far too large for his face, and his dark hair was shaggy. It was strange to see him this way: scrawny, ugly, awkward. Ten or fifteen years had improved his appearance substantially.

Why had that occurred to her? Who cared what he looked like? She thought of the little clench, the little contraction of her chest when he had held her gaze. Oh, god, she thought, disgusted with herself. You've been looking at Unkar Plutt for too long.

The boy and the man sat down on the bank, apparently exhausted, and stared out across the river. Rey felt her body bend and sit next to them.

The opposite bank of the river abutted low, weathered cliffs whose soft-looking walls sprouted scraggly trees with J-shaped trunks, trees that seemed either to be escaping from or aspiring to membership in the forest that topped the cliffs. Not far downriver, Rey could see, the cliff and its forest eased themselves down until they disappeared entirely into an accommodating grassy plain. Here the river widened, tumbling to some unseen sea. In the other direction, the cliff wall curved towards them, nudging the river into a bend at a point perhaps half a mile away. Coming from some distance behind her were the sounds of voices and laughter, and dishes clattering, but somehow she couldn't turn around to look. She was limited, she realized, to seeing what he remembered seeing. She was in one of his memories.

For several minutes, the boy and the man were silent. Or, at least, they didn't speak: they wiped their faces, sniffed, coughed, cleared their throats, exhaled loudly through pursed lips in the way men do after exerting themselves.

Then at last the man spoke. "Should we head in and get some dinner?"

"I'm not hungry," said the boy.

"Not hungry?" laughed the man. "You just fought me for a solid hour! I hope I'm not boring you out here." 

"I'm not bored. Just…" he trailed off.

The man's face showed his sympathy. "You miss home."

Rey felt the boy's yearning well up inside her: he loved his parents, it seemed, desperately. But she could also feel disappointment, resentment, shame, intense anger. His emotions, strong and barely controlled, swirled through her in high, hysterical color; it was both disturbing and strangely exhilarating. It occurred to her that on most of the days of her life, she had not only done nothing—besides scavenge and hope for Plutt to be in a generous mood—but also felt nothing. Day after day of dry sand feeling.

"Yes. No. It's nothing," he said.

"It's okay. I know being away from your family is hard. Trust me," he said. "If I know anything, I know that." His expression was kind and attentive; he was clearly thinking of the boy and not himself, but the sadness in his voice was unmistakable.

"Can I ask you something?" said the boy. Rey had the feeling that whatever the question was, he had been holding it back for some time and with difficulty.

"Anything, Ben."

"Why didn't you join him?"

Rey felt a strong, burning, eager curiosity. And she found that she knew, suddenly, who the man was.

Luke's face registered his confusion. "Why didn't I join whom?"

"He was your father. Why didn't you join him?"

"Why didn't I turn to the Dark side? Join the Emperor?" Luke looked, now, both wary and bewildered, still trying to understand the question enough to answer it.

"You could have changed the Empire. You and Grandfather, together. If you had the power, you could have ruled the galaxy the way you knew was right."

Luke seemed unable to speak for a moment. Then: "Ben, the idea that any one—or two—people should rule the galaxy is what's wrong. There is no right way to—" he paused, looking for the words. "There is no right way to be a dictator. The Rebellion was fighting for freedom, for…democracy."

"But…didn't you want to be with him? Didn't you want to learn what he knew?"

Luke sighed. "Of course I wanted to be with him. He was my father. But that's why I had to turn him back to the Light! I knew there was still good in him. I knew he was still Anakin Skywalker. I wanted my father. Not Darth Vader."

"But they were the same person."

Luke shook his head vehemently. "No. No. Obi-Wan—Ben—once told me that Vader betrayed and murdered my father. And when I learned the truth, I was angry that he lied. But I came to understand that he didn't. He didn't lie, not really. My father was Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader…took him over. Killed him—or tried to. But he wasn't dead. I met him, I knew him, just before he died—well, you know this story. He turned on the Emperor, turned back to the Light, to save me. My father was a good man. When he became Darth Vader he…became someone else."

"But he didn't become someone else. He was still your father, just…different. And you could have shown him—you could have used your power together to make things better. There's so much…sickness in the galaxy. So much senseless pain."

Rey had a sudden, vivid impression of a woman in a long, patterned dress lying by the side of a dusty street, the dark pool of blood from the broad slit across her neck congealed in the dirt. Her eyes were open. There were flies, and worse. Boots and shoes tramped by and did not stop.

"Pain is unavoidable, Ben. The Force arises out of Life, which is both joy and pain."

"It doesn't have to be. There doesn't have to be so much pain. People just need to understand."

"Understand what?"

"They need to—someone needs to enforce the rules." He stood up and started pacing and gesturing. Impelled by the force of the memory, Rey, too, leapt up and began following him in lockstep. "About how to behave," they said together. "Once everyone understands, then there won't be any more pain." They faced Luke squarely. "The Jedi should be doing that. What good is the Force if we don't use it to—"

"We?" Luke interrupted mildly. The interruption enabled Rey to wrest back control of herself. She stepped backwards away from the two men, as far as the memory would allow.

Ben flushed, but his flush was at least as angry as it was abashed. "I know I'm not a Jedi yet. But when I am, I'm going to use my power to fix things. I'll make the galaxy better, for everyone."

"Ben, being a Jedi doesn't mean standing in judgment over people. It doesn't mean 'fixing' anything. When we fought the Empire—your mother, your father, Chewie, me, Obi-Wan, Master Yoda, the Rebellion, all of us—we weren't trying to fix the galaxy. No one can do that. We were only…"

Luke was still talking but Ben had evidently stopped listening. The image of the dead woman surged into her mind again, and suddenly she was there, at Rey's feet.

"Mommy? Is she dead?" A little, dark-haired boy, maybe seven or eight. Rey felt his childish confusion and wished desperately that he would stop staring at the maggots. She closed her eyes to block them out.

"Yes, sweetheart. Don't look." Rey looked and saw a beautiful woman—the boy's mother, her name registering in Rey's mind only as Mommy. She tugged at his hand and he walked with her, away from the corpse. Rey followed.

"How did she die?"

The woman didn't answer.

"Did someone kill her?"

"Yes," his mother said carefully. "I think so."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe they wanted her money. Or—I don't know. Probably they wanted her money."

"People kill people because of that?"

"Yes, they do. It's very wrong, but they do."

"Well, why don't we do something? Find out who killed her? Should we make a peer for her like Uncle Luke did for Grandfather when he died?"

"A pyre? No, Ben. We don't know her."

"Why does that matter?"

A familiar voice cut in impatiently, "She's none of our business, kid. We've got our own business to do here." Rey and the boy looked up. Han Solo was fifteen or twenty feet ahead, evidently in a hurry.

Ben stopped walking. "Well, whose business is she?"

"Not ours," Han had said, exasperated, continuing to walk.

Ben planted his feet and curled his little fists.

"Do something!" he demanded. He sounded petulant, but Rey felt the unruly swirl of a child's anxiety, the big, frightening, inarticulable emotions that resolve themselves into demands that adults judge unreasonable.

Han stopped walking and turned around. He threw up his hands. "What do I look like, the Mos Eisley Sanitation Department? Come on!"

Rey winced. A poor choice of words.

Small Ben stood, feet still apart, watching his father walk away, his great stand ignored. Rey felt intensely his embarrassment, fury, disgust.

"Come on, Ben," his mother said gently, holding out her hand. Rey was behind them as they began to walk away and by some misfortune of physics and optics, his last glance back at the body led straight through her eyes.

*

Ren felt a loosening; the girl was pulling away from him. He pulled back, too, and as he returned to his mind—a distinctly odd, swooping feeling—he became suddenly aware of the memory she had seen. The scrawny, stupid boy he had been. The Woman. He reeled backwards. Still strapped to the chair, she cried out, apparently having just learned what he had seen. 

He hated being laid bare to this girl; he hated the bleaching loneliness of her memory; most of all, he hated the storm of pain that he knew was crackling inside her, barely contained, waiting to unleash itself. She was unstable, bomb and detonator rattling together inside her, and he wanted to cast her as far from himself as possible. He reached into his cloak for the saber; he would kill her and his mind would clear. But even as the intention formed he saw that it was impossible. The problem was simple but entirely insurmountable: if he killed her, he would never see her again.

Unable to act and unable to think, he picked up his helmet and pulled it on, tapped out a code on a panel near the door and fled the room.

*

Rey's chest was tight and her eyes felt the strain of holding back tears. That family, that awful day. She struggled vainly with the impassive restraints, frenzied and choking. She strained against them until her skin felt raw and red blooms appeared on her dirty arm wraps. Unbidden, the image of the dead woman appeared in her mind and Rey was struck, suddenly and cruelly, with the question of whether she had a child somewhere who wondered why she hadn't come home. Tears began streaming, unchecked, off of her nose, lips, and chin, spattering her lap.

When at last she had cried herself out she tried, once more, weakly, to loosen the restraints. She winced with the pain and realized that she would never free herself this way.

She dropped her head back against the chair and tried to think. No plan presented itself and she found herself thinking instead of a day many years ago, perhaps six months after her she had been left on Jakku, when she had spent an entire afternoon carefully extracting a complicated-looking piece of hardware from a Star Destroyer. Evening was falling and the outpost's oily lamps were giving off their characteristic odor of rancid fat when she proudly presented it to Plutt. He had laughed a loud, shouting laugh and told her it was the mechanism that governed the Destroyers' automated bathroom cleaning system, a system for a military ship, a ship much larger than anything now in service in the Inner Rim. He had tossed it back to her. "Why don't you see if you can get it to clean your shelter?" he had yelled, wobbling all over with mirth. She had eaten nothing that night, and had come to the sober realization that if she was to survive, she could not scavenge mindlessly. She would need to understand the oddly-shaped hunks of metal and wire and the systems in which they functioned. The next day she started teaching herself ship mechanics. Soon she could recognize and evaluate the hardware governing power, communications, navigation, hyperspeed, life support, weapons. She had never made such a mistake again. Strange, she thought, to be remembering that now.

Then, suddenly, she understood why this odd memory had wandered through her mind. The glimpse into his past was valuable: she was learning him the way she had learned TIE fighters and Star Destroyers. This man was not more complicated than a Star Destroyer. He was not more dangerous than starvation. Her present situation was really not that much worse, she reasoned grimly, than the one she faced every day of her life: learn the systems, or die. If she was resourceful, she would find a way. If she was vigilant, she would stay alive.

Satisfied, and thinking about vigilance, she fell asleep.

*

Ren stalked the halls of the Starkiller, trying to regain his composure. A technician of some kind scuttled across his path, impeding his progress. Ren seized the man and threw him aside with all of his considerable strength, then turned around, picked him up, and threw him down again. The path to his quarters was clear after that.

Once in his rooms, Ren thought he might find peace in a conversation with his grandfather. But looking at the mask reminded him, in the moment, only of the Empire's defeat at Jakku, the son who forced his own father's betrayal, his own disappointing father. He took off his helmet and put it down next to Vader's. He stared at the two masks: one beaten, burned, and decayed; the other battle-worn but glinting maliciously in the low light of his room. Vader had been betrayed in the end. His son, the Jedi traitor, had pulled him to the Light.

Ren could not let that happen. His attachment to this miserable girl must not become a weakness.

But what could he do? He could not set her free, be rid of her beautiful eyes, because she was too powerful. She would learn to use her power with or without a teacher, and she would become an enemy of the First Order. He could not imprison her; she would escape imprisonment as soon as she was strong enough and angry enough. And he could not kill her; he could not. "Grandfather," he said. "Show me the way. I'm lost."

He stared at the mask, feeling ashamed because he had allowed himself to want a woman, justifying his weakness by thinking of Vader's wife, even, when he knew she had brought him only tragedy. She had adored him at first, but she had left him, had hidden his children from him, when she discovered who he was. Hers, it suddenly occurred to him, was the original betrayal—his son's was secondary. If only he'd had her to rely on when he had to make the hardest choice of his life. If only he hadn't been alone.

And then it came to him: the solution. It was so easy that he couldn't believe he had not thought of it immediately.

He would be weakened without her. But unimaginably powerful with her at his side.

He would not turn.

She would.


	3. Chapter 3

Rey woke to find him sitting in the chair opposite her. Unmasked. Watching her.

"Come with me," he said.

"I appear to be tied to a chair," she said evenly.

"Come with me," he repeated, and closed his eyes.

She felt him Push—no he wasn't Pushing her. What was—he was pulling her into himself. She let him.

*

Ren didn't know what it would be like to see himself inside, with her, and through her, and he prepared himself to contain his surprise at whatever he found. Fire, he thought. Perhaps a black fortress. He reached for the girl in his mind and felt her yield.

The silvery grey island and its dark, sparkling, encircling sea were not what he had anticipated. They were a far cry from her infinite sky filled with blue and Light, but he was stunned, nonetheless. The air was clear and the ocean broke gently on the island's feet.

She spoke from behind him. "This is you," she said. "How can you be here, too?"

"I have…Pulled you," he said. "Into myself. I'm seeing myself through you." He barely believed the words as he spoke them. He understood without exactly knowing how that what he now saw—the island, the ocean—had something to do with what she wanted to see, but also something to do with what he wanted to show her: her mind seeking his as he Pulled her in, and his mind revealing itself to her. Where had this come from? Why was it so…pretty? He felt discomfited, but reminded himself that if she saw in him something she thought beautiful it would only help his cause.

"But how—"

"I don't know," he interrupted. "I've never done this before."

"Wh—how did you know what would happen?" she sputtered.

"I didn't."

"You just yanked me into your mind and dove down after me without any idea of what might happen?"

"Yes."

"Why?" she demanded. "Why did you bring me here?"

He turned to her. "I'm going to turn you to the Dark side."

*

She felt annoyed, rather than afraid. "Really," she said coolly. "How are you going to do that?"

"I have no idea," he said. His face was impassive.

She had not expected this, and paused before snapping, "You don't seem to be much of a planner."

He was strolling around, looking out at the sea, down at the rocks. "What do you want?"

"What do I want?" Rey was incredulous. "I want you to let me go!"

"I can't let you go," he said shortly, but off-handedly, as if he had said, "I can't fix a hyperdrive" to someone who had mistaken him for a mechanic.

"Then I guess you can't give me what I want," she said, as if explaining something to a child, some principle of behavior that he ought to know already.

"There must be something else." He said this with assurance, as if he were informing her of a fact rather than coaxing her into a revelation. His manner was so strange—he was so strange. He was at once soft-voiced and brusque. His taste for cruelty seemed to flame brightly and then extinguish in an instant. He oscillated between intensity and diffidence so quickly that he seemed to be in opposite states simultaneously.

"There isn't."

"You have nothing. It's impossible that there is nothing you want."

Rey didn't speak and he resumed wandering: up a bit higher, back down, close to her, away. He was right, of course. She cursed him silently for his intuition. She wanted—everything. Leaving Jakku had terrified her: what if they returned and she wasn't there? But she'd flown the Millenium Falcon. She had escaped a rathtar, met Han Solo, seen Takodana, a world so lush she would not have believed it could exist if she had not seen it. And she'd made friends—at least, she thought she had, until Finn had taken off with the pirate, left for the Outer Rim. She felt as if she'd been asleep—forced into sleep—for a long time and was at last struggling up through the haze into someplace hard and vital. She did want, lots of things.

He'd said she was the only person he'd ever met who was more alone than he was; he seemed to understand her. Perhaps that meant she understood him, too.

"Why didn't you go after the droid, on Takodana?" she asked suddenly. "Wouldn't it have been easier to get the map from him? Did you take me just because you wanted someone to talk to?"

He was pacing away from her and she saw him freeze.

Got him. She felt a swell of triumph but kept her voice flat. "You were bored? Wanted someone to torment?"

He turned slightly toward her, but only slightly, so she could see his face in profile. "I don't want to torment you. Believe what I say. I will give you anything you want." His hands were now balled into fists: a symptom of anxiety he had apparently never shed.

She was beginning to feel emotion vibrating off of him again, like soundwaves, like she had felt in his memories, and some lunatic part of her liked being near him because of this. He felt chaotically, destructively alive, a vine that strangled a tree but reached for the sun.

"Why do you want to give me what I want?" she asked, trying to reorient herself. "I'm not cooperating with you. Why not just kill me?"

"I can't."

"Because of the map?"

He didn't reply. It wasn't because of the map. Which left: her.

"You want me?" she said slowly. "Not the map?"

"I can teach you," he said, abruptly changing direction, cloak swirling behind him, and coming to stand in front of her. A little closer than perhaps he should have stood. She stood her ground, though her pulse accelerated.

"Teach me?"

"I can show you how to use your power."

She let out a short laugh. "What power?"

"You're strong with the Force. The Light. I felt it. Inside you. But I can teach you the ways of the Dark side. I can show you how to use your power." He paused and lifted his chin slightly. "I'm ready for an apprentice."

"You want me to be your apprentice?" She answered his presumption snidely. "I don't think you have anything to teach me."

Incredibly, a look of hurt crossed his features, but then vanished. "Why do you say that?" He didn't sound offended now; he was seeking information.

"I put my hands in the water before and I felt nothing." Rey stepped even closer to him, feeling a thrill of excitement at her own boldness, at being so close to someone that everyone was supposed to fear, someone who should have found it easy to kill her but somehow couldn't bring himself to do it. "You stalk around, masked, and people believe you're powerful, but inside your mind," she paused and, heart pounding, poked her index finger into his chest. "Inside you, there is nothing but a pleasant island on a cloudy day."

"You put your hands in the water," he said, seemingly to himself. He looked as if he had just come to understand something that had puzzled him.

"What?" she demanded, dropping her arm to her side.

He looked past her and stretched one gloved hand out towards the ocean. She stepped back: one step, then another.

"Watch."

*

Ren concentrated, and began to summon his power. He pulled deeply from the Force, feeling it seething and slipping towards him from the Darkest places in space and time, power born of slaughter and the clanking of chains. The sea began to roil and heave. Waves crashed against the island. The little glittering specks became luminous as the water itself grew darker. The air felt charged and thick.

He glanced at the girl. She had not turned around; she was still facing him, looking past him, across the tiny island to the horizon behind him. Her breathing appeared to have accelerated, but otherwise she held herself still. He concentrated and the ocean began to flow, first sluggishly but then rapidly, clockwise around the island. Then the girl inhaled sharply: in a massive dark spiral, he ocean was rising from its bed.

He watched as the water rose higher and circled faster, whipping up a wind that pelted them both with salt and dust and bits of rock. The specks began to tremble and snap toward one another. The humming sound rose to a shriek and the dark water surrounded the island in a swirling black curtain that soon reached all the way to the clouds. The unreleased energy felt as if it would split him in two, and the experience of standing inside himself, seeing this projection of a process he knew to be going on inside his own mind (wherever that was) was becoming acutely vertiginous, and nauseating. Ren gritted his teeth and tried to hold his stomach in check. The bright specks ran together into miles-long webs of jittering bluish lightning and the rock beneath his feet began to vibrate as if it might crack.

"Rey," he shouted, realizing suddenly that he knew her name and could use it. His voice cut through the wail of the storm. "Do you doubt my power now?"

He opened his eyes. She was just staring upward, transfixed, not even attempting to protect her face from the furious windstorm or her ears from the deafening whine.

He dropped his arm. The lightning and the shrieking sound stopped. The air pressure plummeted and pain shot through his ears. And then, after hanging motionless for a moment, as if disappointed not to have been released, the ocean came down with a deafening crash. The waves were mountainous but the island was untouched, and the water rapidly settled into its former gentle, swirling glitter.

*

Rey was afraid she would fall if she took a step. Her head was ringing and painful from the shift in air pressure.

"You're going to faint," he observed.

"I'm not," she gasped, swaying a little.

He removed his cloak and spread it on the ground next to her.

"You should sit down," he said. "You're going to fall."

"I'm not," she insisted, just before her knees buckled.

He paced back and forth a few times, then stopped in front of her. "You're afraid to be weak," he said, still standing as she sat where she had collapsed: on the soft lining of the heavy cloak. "I know how you live. I saw. Alone, half-starved. Weakness means death. I can make you powerful."

"Stop trying to get into my head," she snapped, still shaky.

"I'm not." He paused. Then: "I'm also afraid of weakness."

She looked up at him, surprised for a moment, then she understood what he must mean and looked away. "You mean you're afraid of becoming a good man—like your uncle, or your father—" He snorted, interrupting her, and she looked back at him.

"You don't know my father. He isn't the hero you think he is."

"Because he wouldn't bury that woman? Or—build a funeral pyre for her?"

He looked at her for a long time with his blood-wine gaze. "Yes. Among other things."

"What things?"

He was silent again. Talk, damn you, she thought.

"He wanted a different son," said Ren shortly. "And I wanted a different father. I found one. There's nothing more to say."

"A different father? Your uncle? Luke Skywalker? Whom you're planning to kill?" 

"No," he said, his disgust evident in his voice. "My Master. Supreme Leader Snoke. He showed me that I was right to mistrust the Jedi. Mistrust Skywalker. Right to see their failure to use their power to extract obedience from those who would be thieves and rapists and killers as a catastrophic, unforgivable failure of moral judgment." He was speaking through clenched teeth now, veins raised on his forehead and the back of his fists. "They had the power to bring justice, peace, to the galaxy and they refused it! Out of cowardice!"

It was Rey's turn to be silent for a moment. Ren walked away from her and seemed to be trying to compose himself. "So you walked away? Turned to the Dark side?" she called after him.He seemed to stiffen a bit, but he didn't respond. "You said you were afraid to be weak. You meant you're afraid someone will find out that you feel sorry for the soldiers you enslave. That someone will find out—that someone will find out that you're doing all of this because of a dead woman on a dusty street."

This time his answer was immediate, the lash of a whip: "Yes."

Rey was taken aback at his honesty. Then she was angry. She stood up. "Why don't you just go back to your family?"

He stopped walking. "I can't."

"I saw you, too," she continued. "I know how you felt—how you still feel, apparently—about that woman in the street. I know how you felt when your family sent you away. Why not go back to them?" She paused. "We understand each other, you and me. We both just want to go home." Rey was surprised to find that she meant this. She hoped he would listen, imagined the look on Han's face when she returned his son to him.

For a few moments there was silence: Rey heard only the soft rush of the waves and the gentle, occasional static of sea breeze in her ears. Then he walked back toward her, slowly, and said, "There is no peace in freedom. The only real peace comes in submission to one strong enough to crush the predators and thieves that terrorize the little lives of ordinary men and women. The Jedi, and many more, will be lost in the struggle. Mourn their loss if you must. But know that you are bringing peace to the next generation. They will live and work in a world that is safe for all who obey." He spoke quietly and almost rhythmically, as if in prayer, as if he had recited this many times.

"What? What does that mean?"

"It doesn't matter."

"What does that have to do with your family?"

"It doesn't matter now. It's too late." Emotions were beginning to show on his face and she read them as impatience, frustration, and something else: a need of some kind. He wanted something from her: understanding, or sympathy. Or was it just compliance?

"Too late for what?"

"For me."

"It's not—"

"That's why I need you with me," he interrupted fiercely. "I'll be stronger with you."

"Stronger? Stronger for the First Order? For the Dark side? I don't want to join the Dark side!" she sputtered. "I don't want to make you stronger! I don't want to help you kill your uncle!"

"You don't have to. I won't ask you to. I only want you to stay with me."

Rey missed a beat. It was as if a new section of her heart had to be hastily grown and supplied with blood and oxygen in order to comprehend this information: I only want you to stay with me. This new piece of heart felt raw and red-pink and very strong because very young. She felt her chest contract again and tried to recover herself. "I don't want to be your apprent—"

"I don't want an apprentice," he cut in, with the same intensity, the same stumbling rush of honesty that she'd felt when he had asked his uncle about Darth Vader. He was breathing heavily and his shoulders were hunched and tense. Rey noticed that the sea was moving again. She felt a breeze rifle through her hair like a rough hand.

"Then what do you want?"

"You."

"Me?"

"You. Your devotion," he said, fists clenching, barely choking out the words.

"To the First Order? Not likely."

He looked at her and his face showed longing and fear and exaltation. "No. To ME," he said. He came forward and put his hands on her upper arms, squeezing them hard as if he was about to shake her.

"You're binding me again," she said angrily, shaking him off. "Stop."

He let go immediately and stepped back, which surprised her but she was determined not to give him credit merely for keeping his hands to himself. "What," she demanded, "could possibly make me want to devote myself to you?"

"I don't know!" he cried, looking desperate and miserable. "Tell me what you want!"

"I cannot think of anything, in the entire galaxy, that you could do that would—"

Then the words, fateful words, change-everything words, burst from him: "I will find them for you!"

The stirring breeze stopped. The sea itself seemed to hold its breath.

She was unable, for what felt like ages, to speak.

"You know that's what I want," she said shakily, "Because you saw that memory, that day. You're just...telling me what I want to hear." She felt as if she were assembling thoughts and words from wreckage, as if she were on her knees piecing together something that had crashed at her feet. A dangerous thing, something she should not touch.

"Yes. I am telling you what you want to hear." His voice, incredibly, was shaking as much as hers and his mouth was quivering. "Because I need you and so I will give you everything you want. I can find them. I will tear the galaxy to pieces."

This is too much. Too much to ask of me, she thought, only vaguely aware of what she might mean by this. "You're lying," she whispered, tears beginning to spill down her cheeks, half hoping this was true and half praying it wasn't. Had he planned this all along? Did it matter?

"I'm not. I will never lie to you. I want your loyalty. I want—" he hesitated, but then plunged forward like a horse through a sheet of flame. "I want your love. But unswerving. Faithful. Not like—" he stopped and seemed to be making an enormous effort to contain himself. "I held you. In your memory. Put my arms around you. On the speeder. And now—" he threw up his hands and looked at her with a strange mix of helplessness and resentment, his inability to finish his sentences standing in, it seemed, for a deeper loss of control. "I know it will take time. For you. But I will do anything. I will start by giving you back your family."

The new little piece of Rey's heart was so very young and so very strong and it drew in the madness of his improbable, impossible desire—or love? he had all but said the word—and pumped out the wild, precious hope that he would find Naya, find her father, find her mother. It bullied the rest of that neglected organ until all her heart's chambers pounded in rhythm and told her to stay, stay, stay. The thought of his arms around her, which might have enraged or disgusted her even ten minutes before, made her feel faint and heavy but sparking with energy, terrified but electrified because suddenly she knew that she was going to touch him, going to kiss him, going to take things as far as he would let her go. He had become, all at once, the key to everything she wanted—emotion, connection, touch, family. She took in his madness like a transfusion of blood and let it fill her veins until they swelled almost to bursting.

Heart beating fast, she approached him slowly and when she placed her palms on his chest he exhaled sharply. He put his hands gingerly on her waist and his eyes closed as he bent his head down, but she did not kiss him; not yet. She lifted her head and her lips hovered close to his and she could feel the powerful need push-pulling between them, slowing down time and quieting sound and she spoke into his slightly open mouth.

"Why?" she whispered. "Why do you want ME to love you?"

He licked his lips and swallowed.

"Because you're not afraid of me."

*

Ren tried to push from his mind the fear that he wouldn't be good at this, that he would be clumsy, that she would laugh, or grimace with discomfort. She was so small, and light-boned like a bird; he was afraid he would crush her.

But she seemed to want him to. She seemed nearly out of her mind with want, in fact. With something, anyway. He had the strangest feeling that even as she held him and tried to pull him closer—impossible, unless he was to be in among her entrails—that she was only dimly aware of his presence.

She was, in fact, utterly overwhelmed by it. Before, her solitude had filled her bleak, empty planet so completely that sometimes she felt it as part of the atmosphere, emanating from her, spreading outwards and upwards, hazy against the airless boundary of space. Now he was everywhere: she could feel his weight on top of her and his warm skin beneath her hands, hear his breathing, quick and sharp. He smelled like wool and leather and soap and sweat and when he kissed her she tasted something she couldn't place, something sharp, clean, a little sweet. Her field of vision flickered: darkness as she closed her eyes at his kiss, snatches of his face, chest, shoulders, a long view between their bodies that culminated in murky warm darkness at the far end like perspective lines that blur together at the horizon.

Then a question in his eyes, a little word, and when he entered her and began moving inside her the sensations came in an engulfing wave, swirling and blending until she could not tell one from the other: sight from touch from sound, pain from pleasure. Neither could she say for certain whether she was upright or lying down, staring up into the sky or somehow suspended upside down looking into a fathomless abyss into which she could fall if he removed his sheltering body. She was disoriented, terrified, but at the same time aroused to such a pitch that she could do nothing but gasp for air and cry out for him not to stop because if he stopped she felt certain the unreleased energy would kill her. The sensations built and intensified and then, teetering on the brink of unreality, or madness, she seemed to see strange figures rising from a yellow fog, someone screaming, and then the scream filled her mind and became a shock wave of pleasure that shook her so violently that her jaw snapped open and her limbs threw themselves into straight stiff lines and the scream was her scream, until she was stretched motionless beneath him, hoarse and gasping.

Ren pulled himself out and lay down next to her, bewildered. At least his worries about not pleasing her had been unfounded. She lay with her eyes closed, trembling hands now resting on her belly, first gasping for breath and then, after a minute, breathing normally. But it had been rather quick, frankly, and he wondered if they were finished already. He glanced down at his undeterred erection. What was he going to do with that?

Then she opened her eyes and looked at him. For a moment her face was blank—but then she smiled and he saw great relief and—amusement? But also a renewed, rosy energy and, most incredibly, gently simmering excitement. "Okay," she said. "Now that's done with, I'm ready. Come back." And she reached for him.

It could not have been more different. This time he felt her eyes on him, she was touching him, kissing him softly. She was curious, lustful, wanting him. If he had liked having access to her body, being able to put his hands on her and fuck her while she writhed and screamed with pleasure he honestly felt he deserved only minimal credit for creating (and admittedly, he had liked it), having her attention was infinitely better—her gaze as liquid and thick and sweet as the fluid that melted around him as he moved in her; her exploring tongue; her body with its dizzying ability to curve, squirm, become convex and concave, press into him and tease itself away (some of these movements involuntary products of the way he was making her feel and others performed, he could see, for his benefit: he couldn't decide which kind pleased him more)—he loved it all.

It seemed absurd to him that he had never done this before, but even as an adolescent he hadn't shared his peers' preoccupation with sex. He had been consumed by exploring the power he had felt growing inside him, his knowledge—but also an understanding too primal to be called "knowledge"—of the Force. The Light, at first. This vast energy, which made him feel deeply connected to everything, not just in space but in time as well, a part of an infinite web of pulsing glowing power, seemed many orders of magnitude more beautiful and more meaningful than rubbing up against a girl until he spasmed into her. Once he learned how deeply he could pull from the Force, the extent to which he could control it and use it to work his own will—which had frightened both him and everyone around him—he had felt the energy begin to Darken and the sense of glowing connection had ebbed away.

But now, holding this woman, he was suddenly frightened again, this time because he felt the connection increasing instead of diminishing, swelling like lungs filling with air: the soft glow, the dazed feeling of astonishment at the beauty of—everything, everything. A memory came to him as if from another life, a day when he was maybe twelve years old: he had placed his hand on the trunk of a tree in the forest behind his childhood home. He had stood there for an entire afternoon, perhaps four full hours, enthralled because he could feel it breathing, creating nourishment from sunshine and water and bitter green chlorophyll, building itself cell by cell, detecting the movements of insects and small animals in the soil. He felt its life in every root and leaf and inch of soft damp wood.

Now he felt himself in danger; this had been a mistake. He was stumbling, allowing himself to be tempted by the Light. But he could no more let go of her than he could climb out of himself. He resolved again to make her turn to him, not the other way around, and he focused his attention on giving her pleasure, showing her with his eyes and his arms that he would protect her and never abandon her.

Rey understood none of this, but she felt his passion for her and returned it in equal measure. She felt as if he had pressed through the dullness of her years of isolation, making her skin gold and glowing and reshaping the long groups of muscles beneath into new patterns meant for new purposes: holding him, touching him, taking him in, making him gasp. She felt lithe and smooth, both safe and liberated, the way a diver is encompassed but unencumbered by a warm sea. The attraction she had felt when she first saw his face, an attraction that had appalled her given the circumstances, now played freely, gleefully. She enjoyed him, touching his strong, muscled body, licking his pouting lips, placing her hand softly on the back of his neck when she kissed him, as she had once seen a woman on Jakku do just before ducking inside a tent with someone.

Finally, squeezing him with her legs, moving on him, feeling him heavy and full in the place that had been empty and waiting and which was now the shaking molten center of the galaxy, she looked shyly at him and then wickedly at him and drew little circles with her fingers. He watched her and feared for his sanity. She breathed and moved and touched and—for a moment her body hung suspended in a perfect arc like a half-rainbow, and then she smashed over him into little, glittering pieces: raindrops, or sunbeams.

Ren held her as she lay collapsed on his chest. He wanted so badly to release himself into her, to let this towering pressure go and feel her accept this final part of him. When she had caught her breath he turned them both over, laying her gently down on her back and looking into her eyes, which shone at him with satisfaction and happiness. He pushed into her with the few quick thrusts his body could tolerate before it tore apart, a gash of pleasure that filled him for a long, elastic moment, just before he lost consciousness.


	4. Chapter 4

Rey felt a swooping and opened her eyes. Her lips and throat were dry and she was sweating in a cold dark room. Panels of lights and switches lined the walls. Kylo Ren, her first lover, lay on the floor, apparently unconscious.

She moved to go to him and was stunned and humiliated when she realized that she was still bound.

She strained against the bonds, suddenly angry beyond any anger she had ever felt before. Her efforts did not avail her, any more than her previous efforts had.

Then she felt a peculiar stillness overtake her. A cool, almost trancelike feeling. Rey stared, unblinkingly, at the restraints that bound her arms. As if to escape her gaze, they wrenched and twisted themselves into pieces and fell to the floor. She felt only a mild surprise. She leaned forward and used her hands to remove the bonds on her ankles.

She sat for just a moment and then savored the feeling of rising from the chair. She felt stiff, as if she hadn't moved for hours. Had she moved? Her body felt unreal, dislocated, confused, as if it were not sure what had just been happening to it. Her mind began to race.

Had it been real?

Had she imagined all of it?

Wasn't something that happened only in your mind imaginary, by definition? If it hadn't been real, had it meant anything? She gazed at his inert form. Could she trust anything she had felt, anything he had said or done?

Had it been real?

This room, certainly, was real. The chair, the tight bonds, the locked doors.

An awful thought: what if he hadn't even been there? What if he had been passively watching her, surveying her for information, weaknesses, while she hallucinated the whole thing on her own?

That probably wasn't true, couldn't be true, made no sense, she thought, feeling twitchy and increasingly panicked, trying to think clearly but her thoughts trampled each other, tripped and stomped, in their rush to fly from her mind.

Even if he had been there, what reason did she have to think he had meant anything he'd said? He had appeared to her as the lovely island in her dreams: was that a fantastic, galactically unlikely coincidence, or had he found the island in her mind when he had interrogated her—or when she'd been asleep: could he do that?—and mirrored it back to her, to make her trust him? Surely he could do that: she had seen that he was powerful, a hurricane of power.

Seeing him prostrate and helpless, however, she fully and uneasily appreciated how much she had been attracted to his power. If Finn was to be believed, everyone was afraid of him. And he had wanted HER. She recalled the elation she had felt while moving on him, the feeling of ecstatic freedom that had gone beyond physical pleasure; beyond the slaking of her panting thirst for human connection; even beyond the wild, mad hope that he might actually find her family, a hope that brightened all of the other feelings into white-flame versions of themselves. Now, that buoyancy replaced with a heavy dread, she understood it: for once, she had been floating above the fear of death. Instead of menacing her with not-quite-enough bread; with the inevitable dwindling of valuable objects to pull from the wrecks; with strangers' voices too near her shelter too late at night; with the grim promise of a lonely end after a wasted life, be it a short life or a long one—instead, death had embraced her, kissed her, sworn to dismantle the galaxy for her benefit. I'm the thing everyone fears, he had seemed to say. But you don't need to be afraid. Not anymore.

How could she have allowed herself to believe that? She had chosen to forget, or had simply ignored, the fact that she was his captive. The panic ripened into fear, a fear both old and new: she could die here.

He was unconscious, and she was free. Should she run? Frozen and dry-mouthed, Rey watched some lights on a panel blink on and off, for who knew what purpose.

Even if he had meant every word he'd said, "unswerving devotion" would mean more than lovemaking in some beautiful, imaginary place. What awful proof of her loyalty would he require? The map, surely. Perhaps not immediately, but eventually. Luke Skywalker's life for hers.

She closed her eyes and imagined embracing Naya, her father, her mother. She could not conjure their faces but she felt them holding her tightly. This lovely and sweet thought hung over all the others like an arbor, a fragile, flowering hope for a life she could still have, a life that maybe she had not yet missed. A life he could give her. He had promised to find them.

But how could she trust him?

How could she wake him?

How could she not?

She had failed to be vigilant; she had let herself go.

She opened her eyes. She had failed to be vigilant, and she had been delivered, nonetheless. This was fortune smiling on her, and she had no right to spit in its face. 

Rey took a long breath, in and out.

Then she turned away from the prone, black-draped figure. She walked to the locked door and raised her hand. It opened for her with a soft hiss. She walked through and the door closed politely behind her.

*

Ren had the same dream he always had: his grandfather—it could only be him, though he could never see his face—burning, maimed and screaming.

*

Stomach knotting, legs and arms and lips feeling numb and then tingling, seeming heavy and then light as paper, demanding explanations she could not give, Rey tried to concentrate as she made her way cautiously through long corridors. This ship was big, whatever it was, and her desperate soul-searching had been replaced by a single, sharp, cold question: What if he wakes up? When anyone seemed to look at her too closely, she silently suggested that he move along. But twitching her fingers and suggesting that he look away would not work with Kylo Ren. She had made her choice; she had made him her enemy. She needed to move, fast.

She began to make her way through the halls, looking for signs of launch bays or escape pods. But before she had come far, she ducked into a maintenance room and was nearly shot by Han Solo.

*

His grandfather cried out, a terrible screaming. A shadowy figure seemed to lurk nearby, watching, not moving to aid him.

*

"Rey!" cried a voice. Then Finn was embracing her, laughing and squeezing her arms, as if to test her status as a solid object and not a figment of a wishful imagination. "Are you okay?"

Han gave her a lopsided grin. "Good to see you, kid."

Rey felt as if she were waking from a strange dream. Finn and Han seemed honest, sturdy, and viscerally real—three things she felt she could not claim for herself.

"I'm okay," she managed, still disoriented and uncertain. "But how did you—why are you here? Where is here?"

Han opened a leather bag and revealed twelve squat cylinders. "Explosives," he said. "This is a First Order base. We're here to blow it up. But Finn insisted that we find you first."

"You came here to find me?" Rey asked, looking at Finn wonderingly. "I thought you were on your way to the Outer Rim."

"I saw him take you," said Finn stoutly. "I wasn't going to leave you here with him. And I wasn't going to go through with this mission until we found you."

The contrast between the man she had just left and the man in front of her could not have been more stark. Had she been crazy? She folded Finn into a hug and he was warm and strong. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you for coming for me."

"Let's get moving," said Han. "We have a Death Star to kill."

But at these words Rey felt her stomach turn over with a sick flop. She tried to focus: This is a First Order base. He commands the First Order. 

"We have to get to the thermal oscillator power array," said Finn. "It's three floors down."

Han started for the door, then stopped and looked at Rey more closely, eyeing the bloodstained wraps. "Are you up for this? Are you..." he cast around for a word: "…okay?" He looked suddenly uncomfortable, even guilty. His son, she thought. His son.

"I—yes," she said. "Do you have any water?"

Finn pulled out a canteen. "I'm sorry, Rey, I should have thought of it."

She took two big gulps and shook her head as she swallowed. Swallowed the water, and everything else. "No, it's okay," she said, wiping her mouth on her wrist out of habit, and wincing as she did so.

"That son of a bitch," Finn muttered.

Han scowled and couldn't look at Rey.

"It's okay," she said. She touched Han's arm and he looked at her. It seemed like a small mercy that Kylo Ren didn't look like his father. "I know," she said. "I know he's your son." Han took a deep breath. "I'm okay," she said. "I'm okay. I'm up for this. Let's go."

"Your son?" whispered Finn incredulously as they peered out to see if the corridor was clear.

"Later," grunted Han.

They slipped quickly through maintenance corridors and ventilation shafts. But emerging into the vast, noisy room that housed the massive power grid, they saw no fewer than six pairs of Stormtroopers patrolling the space. No cover anywhere. A hundred yards away was the grid, sheathed in scaffolding. "We won't make it ten yards," said Han. "We need a diversion."

"I have an idea," said Rey "Come on."

"Come on?" said Han. "What's the plan?"

"Just follow me," she said.

"I sure hope you know what you're doing," muttered Han.

"Just stay close." They made it ten yards before the closest pair of helmetted heads swiveled and a voice barked out, "Freeze. Present your identification."

Rey made a motion with her fingers and said, "There is an escaped prisoner six floors up."

One said, "There is an escaped prisoner six floors up."

"Gather all the men you can and find her."

The other said, "I must gather all the men I can. We will find her."

The troopers marched away, collecting the other guards two at a time, and they all headed to the elevators.

"What did you just do?" said Finn.

"Bought us ninety yards, I hope."

The three sprinted towards the grid.

*

The burning man was extinguished, wrapped, muffled in yards and yards of cloth. He could not move or speak.

*

Rey, Finn, and Han worked quickly to set the charges, twelve in all. When they finished, Han looked at Rey. "Think you can work a little more magic?"

Finn touched his shoulder and pointed to a grate just below the scaffold where they stood. "That might get us where we need to go faster than than the way we came."

"You're the expert on this place," Han grunted.

Thick ropes of bundled wire ran along the ceiling of the narrow duct. They crawled in single file for several minutes until finally reaching a junction with a wide shaft containing a sturdy ladder.

"You're sure this will get us out close to the Falcon?"

"I'm pretty sure," said Finn.

"Alright."They began climbing. Gusts of chill air eddied through the shaft, emerging from the numerous junctions they passed during their ascent.

Suddenly a device on Han's belt started beeping. He stopped to look at it. "This isn't good."

"What?" asked Finn.

"They've found the charges." Another series of beeps. "They're deactivating them, one by one. Ten left. How much longer till we reach the Falcon?"

"Uh, ten minutes? If we move fast?"

Another series of beeps. Nine. Then another. Eight.

Han glanced at Rey and Finn. He sighed. And then he pressed the button on the detonator.

"We've got five. Climb fast."

A moment later the base was rocked by the explosions. Han, Finn, and Rey clung to the ladder to ride out the initial concussion, then began to scramble up at twice their previous speed. "The next junction," Finn panted.

They tumbled into a maintenance corridor, not stopping to rest their aching limbs but racing down the hallway as the base quaked and rumbled. Every twenty feet or so was a numbered hatch, and Finn began to count: "580, 581, 582, 583—that's the one! Through there!"

They burst through the hatch into a loading bay. The freezing air hit Rey's face and she gasped. Clunky supply ships were lined up in rows, and beyond them Rey could see the snowy landscape of the doomed planet on which the base was a fanged, gripping parasite.

Han glanced at Rey and Finn. "Run."

*

Ren heard a voice, shouting at the muffled man: "Get up! Get up!" And Ren was awakened by a rough hand shaking his shoulder.

"Get up!" Hux was shrieking. "Get up! We have to leave NOW!"

"Rey."

"She left while you were napping, idiot! GET UP! The Resistance has detonated charges on the thermal oscillator. We are losing containment! We have only minutes before the base explodes!"

Ren stared at the chair with its twisted metal restraints. I should not have left her bound.

"COME ON!"

Ren shook himself, leapt to his feet, and followed Hux through the door and down the hall, dodging technicians and officers and stormtroopers, some trying to maintain order, some trying to escape, others helpless with panic, still others just bewildered, not understanding what had happened. Explosions were rocking the Starkiller. Smoke was starting to fill the air. Ren and Hux raced into an elevator and pressed the button for the outer level. Nothing happened.

"What's wrong?" Hux asked, his voice rising with panic.

"The base is losing power." With a swift motion, Ren raised his open hand toward the ceiling and the elevator shot upwards, knocking Hux to the floor.

They emerged in a light transport launch bay and made for the first ship in the row.

Ren powered up the ship and took off. Hux was clutching the back of the pilot's chair, eyes bulging. "HYPERDRIVE!" he screamed.

Though they were not yet clear of the planet's atmosphere, Ren put the ship into hyperdrive. In a flash of white starlight, they were away.

*

Stormtroopers turned, looked at Rey and her companions, and raised their blasters; Han and Finn returned fire. The explosions were coming faster and louder. Resistance X-wings were bombing the oscillator from the outside. Stormtroopers were running, frightened, shouting orders, following orders, ignoring orders, firing at the runners, firing at the X-wings. "Get out of here!" Finn yelled at them. "This thing is gonna blow! Run! Get yourselves out!"

They raced across the tundra, struggling to stay upright as the ground rippled beneath their feet. Thirty seconds more, Rey thought, and they would be safe in the Falcon. Twenty seconds. Ten. At last, they were stumbling up the ramp and careening through the corridors to the cockpit. Han slung himself into the pilot's chair; without thinking, Rey took co-pilot and Finn didn't object. "Get us out of here, baby," muttered Han.

"Come on, come on, come on," murmured Rey. The ship lifted off as another massive explosion shuddered through the base. The ground was cracking and sinking as the planet devoured itself.

"We just have to make it out of the atmosphere," Han said, perhaps to Rey and perhaps to himself. The Falcon was flanked by the X-wings, screaming through the sky, pilots sweating but steely, each praying for ten more seconds, even five—

"On second thought," he said, "There isn't going to be any atmosphere." He punched the hyperdrive just as the vengeful star exploded from its magnetic cage, vaporizing the Starkiller in a smug repudiation of its name.

*

Ren dropped out of hyperspace after a few minutes and rose from the chair. "Take the controls."

"Do you have somewhere to be?" Hux snapped.

"No," said Ren.

"Actually, you do," he said. "I would have preferred to leave your miserable carcass on the Starkiller, but Snoke ordered me to bring you to him. He says it's time to complete your training. Perhaps he will teach you not to NAP during INTERROGATIONS!"

Ren ignored him and walked slowly down the hall, increasingly sharp sentences spiking in his mind. She left me. She left me to die. She left me unconscious to die. She had probably helped the Resistance destroy the base. Perhaps she had known the plan from the beginning. He clenched his fists, vibrating with rage. Without knowing or caring where he went, he entered a room, quarters for the transport's dead officers. It contained twelve bunks and as many large lockers, tables and chairs, a mirror for assessing compliance with uniform regulations before leaving the room. He pulled his saber from his cloak.

*

Han took the ship out of hyperdrive after only a minute. They would overshoot D'Qar in another few minutes at that speed. He looked over at Rey. "You did good, kid. That Jedi magic you pulled—I don't know how you knew to do it, but I don't know how we would have gotten to the power grid without it."

"Thanks," said Rey, giving him a small, weak smile. She felt something inside her, stirring, waking. Something she didn't want to acknowledge.

Han was talking. "Probably two divisions on that base. Thirty, maybe forty thousand troops. That's a big hit for the First Order, plus the base itself. And—" he broke off and looked away.

The thing leaped up, howling, and caught her by the throat. She gasped audibly. Kylo Ren was dead.

Han looked over at her. His face was drawn and grey. "I'm sorry for what he did. To you." He paused. "And everyone," he said, with an expansive gesture made bitter by the bitterness in his voice. "Sorry he was ever born. Sorry for all of it." Han heaved himself out of the chair and left the cockpit.

*

Ren slashed the room to pieces, until nothing remained but burned cloth, glass shards, and twisted metal. He threw the saber against the wall and let out a roar. The saber, failing to explode or emit lightning or in any way join him in his anguish, dented the wall but then clanged to the floor. It rolled back and forth in an arc a few times, behaving in precisely the way one might expect a cylinder of uneven thickness to behave, before coming at last to rest. Breathing hard, he walked over to it and picked it up.

He felt its weight in his hand, this powerful thing, red and cruel, that he had built. He had built it, and then it had built him. With it, he had made the wrenching transition from skinny, ineffectual Ben Solo to the man he was now, a man he knew his grandfather would have been proud of. He had been stupid to allow himself to be distracted, to let her push like the small end of a wedge into the places inside him where Light lurked and plotted against him. He had known she was strong with the Light from the beginning, and he had been foolish to think she would turn because she was lonely, because he said he wanted her. She would have awakened in the chair, arms and legs bound, and thought better of trusting him, regretted succumbing to him. Holding her, he had felt scorched by her desire. But he should have known, better than anyone, that that wouldn't be enough.

And then suddenly, he wasn't angry. Of course: Rey would never have turned if she had stayed. She didn't really understand what the Dark side meant. Once she understood, she would have hated him, and he could not have borne that. After the way she had looked at him, seeing hatred in her eyes might end him.

He gripped the saber and extended it, admiring his work. He thought of the soft, warm energy of her mind, undistilled and unfocused. Nothing hard on which to stand. No absolute, irreversible fact.

The problem was that she simply wasn't a killer. Or, she hadn't been, until now. Ren retracted the saber and left the charred room, feeling much better.

*

Alone in the cockpit of the Falcon, minutes away from rejoining the Resistance on D'Qar, Rey was numb. A thought scudded through her mind like a dry leaf on a very cold day: If he had been able to see the island while I slept, wouldn't he have just taken the map, if that's what he wanted? She closed her eyes against thought and feeling and seemed to see a man in flames, writhing in pain. The fire obscured his face.


	5. Chapter 5

The Falcon and its escort of X-wings landed at the Resistance base and the victors streamed out of the ships. The pilots hugged and shouted and accepted the wide grins and claps on the back from the ground troops that had stayed behind. Han and Finn exited more slowly. Rey waited until they had disembarked, then she walked slowly down to the end of the ramp and watched the scene as if from the lower lip of the ship's open mouth.

She saw Finn turn around to see if she was coming, but then a voice hollered his name. Rey watched as Finn swiveled and spied a handsome man with curling dark brown hair. "Poe!" he yelled back. The two men jogged towards each other and caught one another in a big, long hug. A very long hug. Smiles all around.

The only other people not smiling were Han and a woman he was embracing. With a start, Rey recognized her as an older version of the woman in Kylo Ren's memory: his mother. Han was murmuring something into her ear. Her face was buried in Han's neck, but the hunch of her shoulders was unmistakable.

Rey hoped no one would notice her as she stepped quietly across the tarmac, through the crowd of happy people. No one did.

The headquarters of the Resistance was built into the side of a sequence of lush green hills, while mistier, bluer hills hovered in the distance as if on standby in case an expansion was required. Communications and sensor arrays stood on the emerald hilltops like madmen impervious to the weather, quivering antennae and concave faces gazing fixedly at the sky. Multiple large bays yawned out of the green, their concrete retaining walls veined with roots that seemed unattached to any tree large enough to require them. Rey wondered where they went, wondered if perhaps on D'Qar, there were somewhere trees so tall and strong that their roots spread out for miles and miles.

She also wondered where she might find someplace to hide. Sleep. Hide. Wash. Hide.

A man rushed out of the closest bay with damp hair, smelling of soap: late to the celebration. But clean. Rey made for the slow door he had just exited, past coils of cable, hunks of damaged X-wings, and racks of tools left unattended. She caught the door just before it closed and traded green-blue lit by mist-filtered sunlight for fluorescent cool grey.

The room in which she found herself contained more tools, shelves and shelves of spare parts, wire, bolts, generators, paint—and several droids engaged in various tasks: moving things about, lifting, tidying. They paid no attention to Rey, and she recognized them as simple units without anything resembling consciousness. The advanced droids would be outside beeping happily with their masters, but these just toiled on placidly. The same as they would if Kylo Ren himself were to stride into the room, having crushed the rest of the base and everyone in it into a hash of melted steel, pulverized concrete, and blood-soaked earth. It would be only him, and her, and these mindless droids: sorting, cleaning, coiling cable.

Rey stopped short as this image came unbidden into her head. It made her feel sick and scared and she pushed it away. 

"Excuse me," she said hesitantly. The droids did not alter their behavior. "Can you tell me where to find the barracks? The living quarters?" At being asked a question, all the droids, three of them, straightened and turned toward her. In unison, they stiffly informed her that barracks, gymnasia, and mess were in Bunker 3: out the door, turn left, follow the signs. "Thank you," said Rey. They turned back to their tasks.

Rey opened the inner door and found herself in a surprisingly dim, also grey, hallway. She supposed the work areas were kept better lit, for safety. On the wall opposite was a flag bearing the emblem of the Resistance. She turned left, and soon found block-print signs directing her with stubby arrows to "BUNKER 3: BARRACKS/GYMS/MESS." 

Further signs led her past the gymnasia, where she hoped she might find something clean to wear. The gyms featured small glass windows looking out onto the hallway, so Rey could see that they were little more than four or five mostly empty rooms, occupied only by a few racks of weights, some thick mats, and six or eight seriously battered dummies. But, as she had guessed, she found in the hallway a large closet stocked with towels and well-used but clean training clothes. She took a a towel, and a set of the smallest clothes she could find, and continued down the hall toward "LAVATORIES."

Rey placed the fresh clothes and towel on a bench that ran the length of the row of dull silvery stalls. She stripped off her clothes, starting with the bloodied wraps, and while the movements felt recently familiar, everything was rumpled and stuck in ways it would not have been had she undressed only a few hours ago. Her body still seemed to exist in two states, undecided as to which of two things were true of it: this, all this, was loved; or this is desert, as it has always been. A hot fog began to build behind her eyes. She pushed it away and focused her attention on the shower mechanism in the first stall: a flat, round metal knob the same color as the stall.

Occasionally while scavenging Rey would climb through a ship's living quarters. Everything of real value had long since been taken, but many rooms were occupied by broken furniture, bent plates, torn clothes, sometimes all heaped together on a wall or ceiling that was living out its afterlife in the twisted wreck as a floor. Rey would imagine the soldiers sitting, standing, putting on clothes, taking them off, eating from dishes, even using the bathroom. All together: so many of them, especially in the Star Destroyers. The showers in the lavatories had always held a particular fascination: how much water came out of them? Was it cold?

She turned the knob, all the way to one side, and a spray of water leapt from the nozzle above.

Rey put her hand into the water and felt it warm up. She watched it fall and then swirl down the drain.

Thinking deliberately about whether the sum total of her bathing experiences on Jakku had required as much water as she had run down this drain before even stepping into the stall, she stepped into the stall. But as soon as the warm water began sliding over her skin, boldly and intimately, she could not stop her body from feeling, or learning, or deciding, that every touch and kiss and look had been, unquestionably and absolutely, real.

The sob started as a slow contraction of her abdominal muscles that curled her forward, as if a large hand was on her back, folding her, molding her as he had, giving her another new shape, but a crumpled form unknown to geometry. Her lungs would not inflate. Her face contorted and the fog behind her eyes built into unbearable pressure. She was doubled over, arms wrapped around herself, not moving, not breathing, a corpse in rictus balanced upright. At last, the part of her brain that was deeper than grief delivered a cold command to her lungs: Breathe. Air ripped into her chest and out again, in and out with hoarse rasps, until one exhaled breath finally dragged with it a rending cry. The pressure in her head liquified and dripped from her eyes. She lowered herself to the floor and while the water flowed over and around her and down the drain, she cried until she was limp and silent, a heap of flesh in the bottom of the shower stall, wreckage pinged by the obscenely unceasing water droplets.

A few minutes later, she was dressed in beige pants and a long-sleeved beige shirt and combing her hair with her fingers, staring straight ahead at her red, mottled reflection in the hammered metal mirror and hearing "thirty, maybe forty thousand" in Han's voice, playing over and over in her head, when she heard a real voice behind her. "Rey."

She turned to see a woman in the doorway. His mother. Her face was also red, but carefully composed.

"I'm General Organa, but you should call me Leia. I'm—I'm Ben's mother."

She couldn't say his chosen name, apparently.

"I'm afraid to ask what he did to you. But I can't let you carry the burden alone. If you want to tell me, I'll listen."

Rey shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. Leia came in and took the other woman's hands in her own. "Please," she said. "You don't have to protect me. I know who he is."

"You don't," managed Rey.

Leia looked pained. "I will believe you. You don't have to go through this alone."

Again she shook her head.

"I know—I'm his mother—but, Rey, it's okay if you're glad he's dead. It's okay if you hate him. I—"

Rey flinched and pulled her hands away. "I love him."

She was shocked by the words as they left her mouth but she didn't retract them. "And don't say that. Don't say that he's—I can't—" she broke off, heaved one gasping sob, then forced herself back under control. She did not look at Leia, who must, she thought, be wondering if she had lost her mind.

Leia just stared at her for a moment. "That is not what I was expecting you to say."

*

"I know," Rey said, and Leia noticed, wondering how she'd missed it at first, that the girl had evidently been crying, and crying so hard that she'd broken the blood vessels under her eyes. Leia supposed she had registered this but interpreted it as evidence of her trauma? Or perhaps she simply hadn't seen what she had not expected to see.

Rey was, in any event, in no condition to talk about anything. "What do you need?" Leia asked simply.

Rey was unaccustomed to being asked that question, but the answer came to her swiftly, nonetheless. "Sleep. I just want to go to sleep."

The lavatories in the barracks were between the gyms and the living quarters, so Leia led Rey out the quarters-side exit and left her in a private room with an awkward hug and a promise to talk the next day. She was baffled by Rey's confession—what could possibly have happened to prompt her to say that she loved a man who had kidnapped her?

She walked slowly toward the General's suite at the very back of the barracks. The base was cool, silent, and deserted; everyone was outside whooping around a series of bonfires. Sunset was still several hours away but Leia couldn't help but be reminded of another victory, another celebration, a very long time ago.

She replayed the scenes in her mind for the thousandth time: the warm fires, the little Ewoks dancing and playing music, eating and drinking and feeling the relief of a burden so heavy that its removal left her floating, it seemed, inches above the ground. She had told Han the truth about Luke and watched his face transfigure, his expression telling her that this victory meant every bit as much to him as the defeat of the Empire. The bonfires had burned all night, and all night he had held her as if she were the most precious treasure. She had been embarrassed to discover her pregnancy a month later—the date and occasion of conception was both easy to guess and shared, the Census later found, by a large number of babies throughout the galaxy—but Han had been overjoyed.

She had thought of this night so many times—first with affection, in the exhausting and gorgeous first years of Ben's life. Then with wistfulness, as the galaxy struggled and stumbled in its recovery from Imperial rule. After Ben turned Dark the memory had turned dark, too. Her ignorance of her fate, and the fate of the child conceived as she lay in Han's arms and enjoyed his love seemed like a brutal joke played by some hidden power. 

And now, today, she thought dully, Ben's life had ended in exactly the way it had begun. The massive explosion. The glorious victory. The galactic celebration. How peculiar it was to be among the heroes this time. How empty and cold.

If only Ben's life had ended as Vader's had, in an act of self-sacrifice which, though it could not fully atone for the atrocities he had committed, could at least make forgiveness possible, then she might have found some peace now, at the end of her beautiful son's short and violent life. But as it was, he would never atone, never beg or accept forgiveness from anyone. He had simply been a high-value military target, efficiently destroyed. By her.

Though—Rey loved him, or at least thought she did. Why? Leia tried not to hope that something had happened before his death to redeem him, even a little.

When she reached her quarters, Han was there.

"I didn't want to be alone," he muttered.

Leia came thankfully to his arms and put her head on his chest. "I don't want to, either."

*

Alone in her little room (bed, locker, table, chair) Rey could not hear the raucous celebration she supposed was taking place outside, but she could smell the smoke of bonfires and the savory, sickening odor of unlucky animals roasting. She lay on the bunk, not moving, not feeling, just waiting, ages and ages, for the day to grow darker, finally realizing that the room had no window and the light in her room was probably, by this time, a fraud. Rey flicked a switch on the wall and the little cave-like room was immediately submerged in a darkness so complete it seemed more like the vanishing of everything there was to see, instead of the absence of light with which to see it. For a moment she dared not take a step for fear the floor was no longer beneath her, but then she shook herself, walked back to where she knew the bed was, and sat down. She held out a hand, and concentrated. A small flame—though not quite a flame, more like a tiny bright segment of bluish lightning—appeared, flickered, grew stronger. The corners of the room dipped in and out of existence as the light touched them and darted away again.

The little zag of lightning forked and branched, zapped and quivered, burning her hand. She watched it intently, breathing through the pain, then closed her hand and extinguished both, flame and pain. She lay down, rolled over, and went to sleep without thinking of the island, without imagining Naya singing.

All night, the man burned, slowly, his limbs roasting and charring like the animals on the spits outside.

Rey nonetheless awoke the next morning to powerful hunger pangs. Trying not to think, she obeyed this basic urge and left her room for the mess hall. But on the way, people she didn't know stopped to thank her, shake her hand, high-five her—one man picked her up in a bear hug, spun her around, and said, "My fucking HERO right here!" Rey made for the exit and threw up bile into a bush.

She walked shakily down the tarmac, away from the landing site and past the end of the row of bunkers. The complex was stoppered at this end by a neat round hill and Rey climbed up and over it. On the other side the ground meandered almost flatly for awhile before plunging into a broad and deep, thickly forested ravine. Perhaps here were the trees with the impossibly long roots. Rey saw a large flat rock overlooking the ravine and sat down on it. Large, soft-looking grey birds with black beaks were swooping from one side to the other, calling to each other in high, sweet voices. Rey watched them and felt calmer. There were only vultures on Jakku.

"I love this spot." General Organa's voice.

"These birds," said Rey. "I've never seen anything like them."

The General stood beside her. "Kelset ravens. They're all over D'Qar. They wake us up sometimes with their pre-dawn singing." Rey returned her wan smile. The General's red eyes indicated how she'd spent her night.

"Did you get breakfast?"

"No," said Rey. "I couldn't get near the mess hall without—"

"Without what?"

"Without people treating me like a hero."

"Well, Han told me—and Finn must have told everyone else—how you distracted the stormtroopers. He said he thought the mission might have failed without you. Of course they're treating you like a hero. You are a hero!" Her enthusiasm was obviously forced.

"You don't think I'm a hero," Rey said coldly. "I left your son unconscious to die."

The General looked as if she'd been struck. But when she spoke a moment later her face was stony and her voice was steady. "I ordered the strike. On a legitimate military target. It was a military operation against an enemy of the—"

"How can you talk about him like that?" Rey snapped.

"Don't tell me how to talk about my son!" she returned, with equal ferocity. "What do you know about it? His father helped set the charges on the oscillator. You helped, Finn helped, the pilots bombed the base. But I ordered the strike! Do you understand? I ordered the strike that killed him!"

Rey was abashed. "General, I'm sorry—I shouldn't have—I'm sorry."

The General took a deep breath and recovered herself. Rey wondered how often she'd had to do that. Deep breath, carry on.

"Leia," she said quietly, "Please. You can call me Leia." She took another breath and sighed it out. "Rey, I raised a son who grew up to murder…countless…people. Some by his own hand, most with a command, but all dead. I love my son." Her voice wavered but she steadied it. "I love Ben. I have loved him through—all of it. But—I also wish he'd never been born. The galaxy is celebrating because he's dead, but I wish he had never been born. Then I would not have had to kill him."

Leia walked a few paces away and stared into the ravine. After a minute, she came back to Rey and sat down beside her. 

"Sometimes I think the galaxy would have been much better off if none of us had ever been born," she said. "Skywalkers. My brother and I fought our father only to live to fight my son. Our whole lives have been spent battling the Darkness in our own blood. My whole life, anyway. Luke got tired of the fight, I guess." A note of bitterness crept into her voice.

Rey could think of nothing to say to this.

"I'm sorry," Leia said, after a moment. "I'm...upset...right now. Obviously you are, too. Will you—do you want to tell me what happened? You said, yesterday, that you loved Ben. I don't see how you could. I don't understand. Can you tell me what happened on the Starkiller?"

Rey opened her mouth to speak but Leia held up a hand. "Wait, I'm sorry—you said you didn't eat anything. Do you want something? You must be starving."

"I'm okay," Rey said. "I'm not sure I could eat anyway." Her stomach growled.

Leia raised her eyebrows. "Clearly, you could. Let me go get you something—just some bread?"

"You don't have to—"

"I'll be right back."

Rey watched her walk back toward the bunker. There was a unsettled, shifting feeling in her chest that she couldn't identify at first. Then she placed it. It was a fresh version of an old feeling. She missed her mother.

*

Rey ate a hunk of bread and afterwards looked, Leia thought, rather less green. The girl was looking at her apprehensively, though, and she wondered if, in her eagerness to hear something redemptive about Ben, she was bullying Rey into speaking to someone she barely knew about something she would rather forget. But she couldn't drop it. She had to know. "Are you up for telling me what happened?" she asked.

Rey nodded and began to relate the story.

*

Leia listened without interrupting until Rey described the image of the dead woman, the blood and the slit and the flies. The indifferent feet.

"My god," she said. "I had no idea he remembered that. He was seven, maybe eight years old when we saw that poor woman."

Rey thought Leia must have seen a lot in her life to think that her eight-year-old son would forget the image of a fly-covered corpse.

"Who was she?"

"I don't know," said Leia. "We saw her in Mos Eisley. On Tatooine, where Luke grew up. Han and I were there to confer with someone about problems in the new Galactic Senate." Leia frowned and her voice was dry. "The galaxy went from jubilation to infighting and factionalism—almost civil war—within ten years. We were there to meet with someone we thought could help. We brought Ben, of course, and we were walking through the town. She was there on the street."

"And no one was doing anything?"

Leia shrugged and smiled tightly. "Mos Eisley is a rough place. I don't think that sort of thing was—or is—unusual there."

Rey was taken aback by Leia's nonchalance, amd must not have been hiding her feelings very well: "You think I'm a terrible mother. That we were terrible parents," Leia said.

"No—I mean—no."

"You think I haven't asked myself a hundred thousand times what we could have done differently? I could name a dozen other things that look meaningful in hindsight. You saw one memory; I was there for his whole life." She shook her head. "He's a Skywalker, Rey. He just turned out to be the wrong kind."

Again, Rey was silent. The General was a formidable person and it seemed unlikely that she would want comment or comfort from someone like Rey, who had seen so little of the galaxy, so little of life.

"So you saw his memory. Then what?" Leia seemed eager to move on, and Rey obliged.

"I pulled out of his mind and somehow as I returned to my own mind—does that make sense?"

Leia shrugged again. "The Force passed me by," she said. "It makes as much sense as any of it."

"Well, when I returned to my own mind I saw what he saw, when he was in my mind. Without me."

"What did he see?"

Rey told her.

"So you've been alone since you were...?"

"Six."

Leia looked appalled. "You've been looking after yourself since you were six years old?"

"Pretty much, yeah. People would check on me sometimes, you know, ask how things were going. But I lived on my own."

"How did you survive?"

"I ran out of food a few weeks after—after I arrived there. I asked Plutt for food—he runs the outpost—and he told me to bring him something. So I became a scavenger. I got pretty good at it."

"I guess so." Leia was looking at Rey with respect, but there was something else there, too. A judgment of worthiness, a satisfaction. Leia, it occurred to her, wanted her to be a hero—fearless, resourceful, clever—so that her love meant something.

"So, what happened then?"

"Well, I've been there ever since. I was there, I mean, until—"

"No, I mean on the base."

"Oh. Right. I fell asleep, actually, and when I woke up, he was there, watching me. He sort of—pulled me into his mind."

"And it was the same as before?"

"Yes, except he was there. With me."

"And then what?"

Rey wasn't sure what to say. He seduced me? I wanted him and I let myself have him? I agreed to turn to the Dark side in exchange for my family? I tried to bring him back to the Light but then changed my mind? How could she explain to Leia what had happened when she did not understand it herself? She tried to remember what had been said, how she had found herself beneath him on his cloak, and then could remember only how she had felt there, the cloak soft and warm on her back, his body heavy against her, his face betraying an awkward tenderness she wouldn't have thought him capable of, his fingers tracing her lips and touching her hair.

"Rey? Did you fight him?"

Rey started and realized that her eyes had been closed. She was bewildered and embarrassed. She could feel herself flushing. How had she known? And what a strange way to ask. But she felt relieved, nonetheless. "No," she said in a small voice. "I mean, he didn't force me. I wanted to."

She blinked. "You wanted to?"

"Yes."

"Wanted to…what?"

Rey was confused, then: Fight him. To escape his mind.

"Rey? What did you want to—oh."

Rey avoided looking at Kylo Ren's mother. She looked, cheeks burning, at the ravens, who seemed uninterested in carrying her off to someplace very far away.

Finally, she spoke: "Am I right in thinking that you were…intimate?"

"Yes."

"But he didn't force you?"

"No."

"Were you afraid he would hurt you if you didn't? Did he threaten you?"

"No."

"Then—why?"

*

It was a strange thing to know about someone, Leia thought, looking at Rey: she has been with my son. She has known him in a way that is entirely closed off to me. For a moment, Leia felt as she imagined the mothers of ordinary young people felt when faced for the first time with embodied evidence of a grown child's sexual maturity: it was bittersweet, a feeling of irreplaceable loss together with a spark of joy at the knowledge that he had experienced something so beautiful. At least, she hoped it had been beautiful. Ben was nearly thirty, but she rather suspected—hoped, actually—that Rey was his first. Ben had never seemed interested in girls, and once he turned—well. She didn't like to imagine that his Darkness was that deep, that corrupted. She couldn't.

Rey had not answered her question.

"I'm sorry if this is too personal. I don't mean to interrogate you; I just—I just want to know if—" she stopped.

Rey looked questioningly at her.

Leia could not stop herself from confessing in a gush of pleading words: "I want to know if he redeemed himself before he died. Even a little. You said you loved him and I just can't imagine why you would. I want him to have done something or said something to deserve your love. Rey, please. I need to know Ben was still in there somewhere."

"I don't think he did anything to deserve my love," Rey said, feeling cornered by Leia's entirely reasonable question and knowing that she had no reasonable answer. "I don't know why I love him. I shouldn't. But I did; I do. I just do. That's all I can tell you."

*

Leia had been leaning forward, staring at Rey with a desperate, pained expression. She sat back and looked disappointed.

"He—" Rey searched for words, something to make Leia feel better. But she couldn't tell Leia the truth about what he had promised, and what he had wanted in return. Rey's avowal that she loved him, her insistence that she had taken him freely, would make her suspect in Leia's eyes once she knew the terms of his promise.

She also couldn't tell Leia that being with him had felt like creating an entire world, populous and fertile, spinning safe and enclosed and perfect through the wastes of space. She couldn't tell Leia how valuable, how precious he had made her feel: as if she were elemental, something strong and pure, something he needed the way he needed iron in his blood. And she certainly couldn't tell Leia that he had made her explode into shards of light and water.

He had made her feel these things. And then she had left him, and he was dead. The fact of his death seemed to close and reopen like a night-blooming flower. It would fold itself up in the speaking of a sentence, the forming of a thought, the observation of birds. But in the spaces between it again unfurled, a magician's hand revealing the disappeared, exhaling a cold, sticky, noxious perfume.

Leia was looking at her questioningly, waiting for her to finish her sentence.

"He was gentle," she said, thinking that a man's mother would like to hear that about him. "But I don't know why that makes it better," she added a moment later.

"What do mean?"

"If there was good in him. Why would that make it better? He was unconscious, defenseless, when I left him. You ordered the strike on the base. We killed him. You, and me," she said. "I hope there was no good in him. I hope he was evil," she said, her eyes filling. "I hope I'm stupid to love him. I hope I meant nothing to him."

Leia put her arms around Rey but Rey pulled away and composed herself. Deep breath, carry on. "If there's anything else you want to know, I'll tell you, later, but I—I want to go back to my room. I didn't sleep well last night."

"Of course, Rey. I'm sorry to have put you through all this. It was…selfish of me."

"No," said Rey. "No, I understand. I just can't talk anymore now."

*

Leia sat down and watched the ravens swoop and sing.

That day. That woman, and Ben's anger at his father. Of course he would have remembered. Rey hadn't seen the end of the memory, which had made the whole thing so much worse. They had turned a corner and come upon some workers throwing bags of trash into enormous, seething, malodorous carts pulled by scrawny, hairless desert oxen. The bags were made of some cheap fabric, and they were stained and leaking: offal, blood, the pus-colored seepage of rotting vegetables. The pale, ugly beasts were splashed with the refuse, their hides foreshadowing their eventual end in the slaughterhouse.

Ben's eyes had grown wide. "Is that what's going to happen to her?"

"No," Leia had lied. "Your father was being—your father misspoke. Someone will come to collect her and give her a proper funeral, just like you said."

She could tell he didn't believe her, but he was silent after that, and had never spoken of the incident again.

Was that really what had done it? If they hadn't seen her? If Han had not been so callous? If she had spoken to him about it later? If? If?

She reminded herself for the millionth time that another child, another person, would have been galvanized differently—would have become a senator fighting for increased attention to poor worlds, or, more obviously, a Jedi, her brother's equal (probably his superior), a guardian of the Light. She steered herself again down the worn path in her mind that led her, step by step, through the argument that had kept her from collapse since the day of the Padawan Massacre: people all the time emerged from truly harrowing childhoods (and his had been anything but) to become decent, kind people (or to live lives of ordinary cruelty and squalor, lives that didn't involve murder on a galactic scale); therefore: there was nothing I could have done and it wasn't my fault. A path as bloody as his could only have originated in blood.

Of course, it was her blood, too. However she'd raised him, she was at fault simply for having birthed a Skywalker. The way people looked at her—never at Han, not the same way—the mixture of suspicion and blame that emerged when their deferential, Yes, General masks slipped: you loosed him on us. You should never have opened your legs.

It isn't in my blood, she wanted to shout. The evil, the Force—none of it. He came through me from Vader; he wasn't of me. Though she knew that wasn't true. Ben was a fearless commander, a fighter, dogmatic and fixated on what he believed to be right. He had the same flaring temper she had, and, in a twisted way, precisely the same tolerance for disloyalty. He was, truthfully, a lot like her. And she loved him passionately. She could neither claim nor renounce him. Striking him down had been crime and atonement, atonement and crime.

She reached into her pocket and touched a slip of paper: a photograph. As was custom in the Resistance—because it had been custom in the old Rebellion—a makeshift memorial wall had been erected in a quiet place a short distance from the main bunker complex. Photographs of the deceased, tags, mementos, dying flowers pulled from a nearby hillside. Leia had never been there alone; at least one of her soldiers and usually many more than one were invariably there. They stood silently with heads bowed, or huddled in groups telling stories about a fallen friend: snorting with laughter over her escapades, nodding along with a well-known tale of his heroism. Faces were often hastily wiped when Leia appeared. She always smiled kindly and never interrupted. But the photograph of Ben that she carried each time she went to the wall—carried all the time—could never be pinned with the others. It would be asking too much, it would be too cruel, to force her battered, brave and grieving troops to look at the face of the man who was the cause of their grief. His picture, the most recent one she had, taken just before he'd left to train with Luke, grew creased in her pocket and soft from her fingering. If only she could have been there on the Starkiller. If only she had been able to see his face one last time.

Leia bent her head to her knees and wept.


	6. Chapter 6

Rey avoided Leia, Finn, the mess hall, and everywhere else the soldiers gathered for the rest of the day and night and through the next morning. By lunchtime she was famished again but she was practiced at coping with hunger and she still couldn't bear the thought of facing the high-fiving flyboys. She sat in her room and stared at her palm and brought the little flame to life. It hurt less each time and she willed it stronger and hotter to make it hurt more.

Beginning to fear that she was losing her mind, Rey decided at last to take a walk. Perhaps sit and listen to the ravens. She left her room and made her way out of the barracks. She walked to the end of the tarmac, keeping close to the hills so as to remain inconspicuous. Just as she was about to pass the final bunker she heard a snatch of conversation.

"She's hot as hell. But I don't think you have a shot with her unless you wear a mask, buddy."

"What?"

She froze. A couple of the soldiers or techs, she supposed. They were on the side of the hill. Rey could smell the smoke of some kind of weed. She crept as close as she could without making herself visible to them. Her pulse had accelerated. How could they know?

"Keating told me that he overheard the General talking to her beloved husband the other night about what happened up there before the charges blew."

"What, was he spying on the General?"

"He was trying to trap squirrels in the east hills and they were just out there, talking. He starts to hear this conversation. He gets a little closer."

"Uh-huh. He's going to get his ass court-martialed."

"I don't think the General's paying enough attention anymore to give a shit."

The other man grunted his agreement. "Well, what did he hear?"

"She ------- him!" The word was both inaudible and entirely clear to Rey. Her cheeks began to burn.

"Who?"

"Who? Fucking Kylo Ren!" The man was no longer making any effort to keep his voice down.

"What! You're fucking with me."

"I'm not! I swear it. Not fucking with you."

"Holy—with the mask on?"

The first man let out a snort of laughter. "You fucking idiot! How the fuck would I know that?"

"I don't know, I'm just asking! But the bastard probably forced her. That's not funny."

"No! No! That's not what the General said! He did NOT force her. She wanted it. Was, like, begging for it. And she told the General—his mom—that he was, and I quote, GENTLE." He spoke the last word with an exaggerated delicacy.

"Gentle? Maybe it was some other dude in his mask. Somebody stole it out of his locker."

This made the first man laugh again, a big raucous shout. Rey gritted her teeth against the obnoxious sound.

"Well," he resumed, "apparently she's a pretty sweet lay because she fucking knocked him unconscious. That's how she escaped."

"Holy shit."

"I know!"

"That's kind of badass, actually."

"Badass my ass! What the fuck? Kylo fucking Ren? What does a NICE guy have to do to get a piece around here?"

"Hey, you never know! Maybe now that he's all fried up crispy she'll—"

The man's voice was cut off by a choking sound.

The other voice sounded urgent: "Hey! Hey! Are you okay?" Then it was shouting: "Hey! Help! Somebody help over here!"

Rey had been listening intently, vibrating with rage, and was jolted by the cry for help. As she started around the corner she heard the sound of deep, ragged breaths. One man was helping another to stand.

"Is he okay?" she asked, trying to keep the knife out of her voice.

The man who hadn't been choking looked extremely uncomfortable, but said, "Yeah, I think so. It was weird—it's like he stopped breathing all of a sudden, for no reason."

Rey's hands felt stiff and achy. She looked down and saw that they were balled into fists. She opened her hands and flexed her fingers.

"Maybe you should take him to the medical bunker," she said.

"I dunno; he's probably—"

"I think you should take him to the medical bunker," repeated Rey firmly.

The man's eyes unfocused slightly. "I think I should take him to the medical bunker. Thanks." He helped his friend away. 

I'm fucking hungry, Rey thought, trying out a word she hadn't used before. She headed to the mess hall.

*

Kylo Ren stood before Snoke with his head bowed. The massive, gnarled hologram, hunched beneath the roof of a dusty black cavern, peered down its nose. Its voice was a soft hiss. "Kylo Ren. I am...displeased? Let me think for a moment. You say you did not find the map to Skywalker. You lost the girl who saw the map. And Hux informs me that you were...unconscious on the floor? While the Resistance destroyed the Starkiller and nearly forty thousand men?"

"Master, I—"

"Displeased. Yes. That is right. I am greatly...displeased...with you."

"Master Snoke, I—"

"No, on second thought. That isn't right. That isn't it. It's more like...more like...like...ENRAGED!" The last word emerged as a roar that seemed like it should come from an altogether different creature: something with muscles and claws. His open mouth seemed to split his head and his mouth was filled with razor-edged fangs as long as Ren was tall. His bald head and withered face were suddenly red and scaly, and his eyes vanished into dark smoking holes.

Ren started back in shock, but the apparition lasted only a moment, and then Snoke returned to his usual enormous but scrawny appearance.

Ren tried again, his voice a little shakier. "Master, I—"

"You...what? What can you tell me? Tell me something, Kylo Ren."

"I am ashamed that I have failed you, Master."

"You are ashamed. Ashamed, ashamed. Ashamed of what, Kylo Ren? Of failing to locate a fat little droid?" Snoke raised a spidery claw. A pain began behind Ren's eyes. "Or of allowing the little rat to escape her cage?" The pain increased; he gasped. "Or is it—could it possibly be—that you are ashamed of allowing a handful of miserable Resistance fighters to destroy a weapon capable of inhaling a star? A weapon decades in the making? The weapon that was to bring the galaxy TO ITS KNEES?"

Ren cried out and sank to his knees, his head exploding with pain, fingers clawing at his skull. After a moment that seemed much longer than a moment, the pain disappeared. He gasped for breath and held his head in his hands.

Snoke regarded him sorrowfully, then shook his massive head. "Nothing? You have nothing, now, to say? Tell me something that will make me want to spare your worthless LIFE."

The pain came again, worse this time, stiffening his limbs and drawing strangled screams from his throat.

He was again released.

"The girl," he gasped.

"Stand up."

He staggered to his feet.

"Enlighten me, Knight of Ren. Tell me about...the girl.

Ren's muscles all seemed to be singing at a high, awful pitch. He tried to keep his voice steady. "Master, she is strong with the Light. Stronger than any Jedi or Padawan I have ever encountered. She is—"

"You are not even a hundred years old! Stronger than anyone YOU have ever encountered!" He laughed uproariously at this, his shriveled lips stretched over empty gums.

"Master, I know I'm young. And I know the Jedi have been few in my lifetime—"

"Thanks largely to your own efforts," said Snoke, now, apparently, in good humor.

"Yes," said Ren, looking away.

Snoke's eyes narrowed. "Are you...sorry...that you slaughtered them all?"

"No," said Ren. "It had to be done. They were lost in the struggle." It felt good to say it. Ren felt reoriented in the presence of his Master: swift, deserved punishment for his failure; rededication to his mission. He thought of what he'd said to Rey—that Snoke was the father he'd wanted, the father Han Solo had failed to be. Maybe this wasn't quite right. He didn't really think of Snoke as a father. But the cold-fingered, unsettled, drifting uncertainty that had beset him as soon as he understood—felt sure—that his father feared him more than he loved him had vanished in Snoke's presence. With his Master, he knew he was right, knew he was following a path of strength, his grandfather's path. Rey, he felt, was the final step—she—

"Will you kill this girl?" Snoke asked.

He was jerked from his musings and an image of himself holding his saber to her neck in the woods on Takodana came into his mind. It made him feel sick. He spoke eagerly. "I will turn her. I will bring her to you. With her, we will be unmatched by any other power in the galaxy. We will destroy the Resistance and the First Order will be a new Galactic Empire."

Snoke looked at him appraisingly. "Why do you want this so badly, Kylo Ren?"

Ren swallowed. "I only want to serve you, Master Snoke." Not for the first time, Ren was thankful for his ability to hide himself—his thoughts, his intentions, even his Force signature—from everyone, even Snoke. While still Skywalker's Padawan, he began trying to hide his Darkening from his uncle. At first, he cast about vainly for a method; ironically, it had been Skywalker himself who had (inadvertently) shown the way. His uncle's dogged insistence that Darth Vader had killed Anakin Skywalker--"from a certain point of view"--a position that had always struck Ren (or Ben, as he was still called then) as absurd, one day seemed clearly, obviously, head-smackingly true, and he knew what he needed to do. Once Kylo Ren believed deeply and adamantly enough the suggestion that Ben Solo was dead--difficult at first, but in the wake of the Jedi Purge Ren quickly came to see him as one of the casualties, could almost remember seeing him fighting alongside his doomed classmates, could almost remember dealing the blow that struck him down with the others--the Force seemed to give him up gently into the universe and he dissipated. Kylo Ren was Ben Solo's negation, the hole in the Force left by the boy's unusual manner of death. Darkness was drawn into Ren like energy into a singularity; it slipped quickly over his event horizon, pooling inside him, growing dense and thick.

Of course, his belief wavered. And in those moments the Light would tug gently, like a mother adjusting the blanket on a not-quite-sleeping boy, looking for Ben, loving, confused.

And of course, he felt guilty sometimes for shielding his thoughts from his Master, but he reasoned that his weaknesses were his own responsibility. Allowing Snoke to see the flickers of light that plagued him would serve no purpose: he should and could root them out himself. He thought uneasily of the blaze of Light he'd felt when he'd been with Rey. But if he was right, she was even at this moment tearing herself apart over him. She would turn: she would. Then he could love her in velvety Darkness and she would strengthen him, not pull him to the Light. He must not waver now. Everything depended on his ability to stay the course until she was his. Then he would fear nothing, doubt nothing, ever again.

Snoke was looking increasingly suspicious and Ren realized that he had been silent too long, again.

"Kylo Ren," Snoke crooned, "Is it possible--at all possible?--that you want to protect this girl because you have...how shall I say it? Oh, why not? LOVED her? You want her alive because she allowed you release between her taut thighs?"

Ren was speechless.

"Your disguise is intact, Kylo Ren. Never make the mistake of thinking I don't know that you hide yourself from me--but I would not need you if you weren't powerful enough to challenge even my capabilities."

"Then--how--"

"Idiot. I don't need to read your mind to see that you are ADDLED. And surely you do not expect me to believe that she overpowered you--YOU!--with her arms and legs restrained in a chair?" He flicked his hand and sent another blast of pain through Ren's body. He forced himself to stay standing, gasping against the pain, but Snoke appeared bored and ended it quickly.

"I'm sorry, Master," he choked out at last. What you say is true. I did--I did--she submitted to me," he said, knowing full well that this was hardly the case and hoping Snoke would not ask for particulars. "But what I say is true, too. She would be a formidable enemy, Master. But an invaluable ally. Better than turning Skywalker himself."

Snoke looked unconvinced, but then a peculiar expression came over his ugly features. "Skywalker. This girl—where did she come from?"

"Jakku, Master."

"Family?"

"No, Master. She was abandoned there as a child."

"Really." He sat up straighter and his eyes were glinting. "How interesting. A worthless, backward desert world. Garbage and vultures. Somewhere no one would look for a diamond. And she is how old? Twenty, perhaps?"

"I think so, Master."

"And you say she is strong with the Light?"

"Very strong."

"It must be. It's her." He breathed the word 'her' into a long, cavernous, wondering sigh.

"Master?"

Snoke leaned down again and regarded Ren keenly. "Tell me, Kylo Ren. How are you going to turn the girl?"

"I intend to find her lost family," he said, wondering what Snoke had meant by 'It's her.'

Snoke gave Ren a long look that Ren couldn't decipher, and seemed on the verge of rejecting the plan--but then another smile stretched his knobby face. "I can help you in this respect, Kylo Ren. In fact," he said, "I can help you in two respects."

"Thank you, Master," said Ren uncertainly.

"Tell the girl," he said, in a voice that was slow and dark like the water in a rotting bog, "that Skywalker knows where her parents are."

"Skywalker?" Ren was baffled. "Of course, Master." Then: "Does he know where they are?"

"Yes, Kylo Ren, he does."

"How?"

"He is the one who told them to hide her."

"Hide her? From what?"

Snoke smiled again. "From you."

*

Days passed, then a week, then two. Leia ordered the Resistance fighters through their regular training exercises and dispatched intelligence-gathering missions, but mechanically and without much urgency. The military capacity of the First Order had been greatly reduced by the destruction of Starkiller, and no leader seemed yet to have emerged to take the place of General Hux. Snoke still lurked somewhere in the galaxy, but the giant, scrawny hologram hadn't shown himself and without his terrifying emissary he had begun to seem like a figure to be mocked, rather than feared. "I'll bet he's actually about the size of my dick," Leia overheard one soldier say. "That would be pretty fucking pathetic," another said. "Now, if he were the size of MY dick we'd have something to worry about." Discipline is slipping, she thought, without any accompanying desire to rectify this fact.

Of course, no one had come forward to replace Ben. She could almost think of him now without immediately feeling as if she was going to suffocate. Almost, but not quite. It came in waves of lead, this fact of his death, periodically drowning her in dull, bitter-tasting grey, filling her mouth and lungs and threatening to sink her, surround and permeate her, make her hard and inert. 

Han came upon her in one of these moods one afternoon when she was in the situation room, staring blankly at a stack of reports, and, as had so often been the case during the long course of their long relationship, his equally strong mood was irreconcilable with hers. "You've got to stop tearing yourself apart," he said impatiently. "You've tortured yourself enough."

"I'm not torturing myself," she snapped. "I'm mourning the loss of my son."

"OUR son died a long time ago," he bit back.

"You never used to say that," she said, her voice shaking. "When did you stop loving him?"

Han was furious. "Stopped loving him? I can't stop loving him any more than I can stop loving you. But neither one ever did me any goddamn good."

He stalked off and Leia hurled the stack of reports at his receding back.

Later, he arrived with a tentative knock at the door of her quarters. She opened the door and saw in an instant that they would comfort each other, that their ragged edges were at this moment aligned. She had learned to read him so long ago, and she knew to treasure the times when it worked, when their love for one another flared as clearly and cleanly as it had that first night on Endor. She leaned against the doorframe and looked softly at him.

"I'm sorry," he muttered: his typical hangdog apologetic look on his face.

"I'm sorry too," she said. "Come on in."

He did. They sat together on the little hard couch in her receiving room. Han stretched out his legs and at first folded his arms over his chest, but then unfolded them and took her hand. She held it firmly; it still felt so familiar though she hadn't felt its warmth in a long time. "Do you remember," he said, "all the times I tried to teach Ben ship mechanics? Before I lost the Falcon? All the time I spent trying to shove a spanner into his hands?"

"Yes," she said kindly. "I always felt sorry that he didn't love the Falcon like you did. Like you do."

"I wish I had spent that time standing around with him touching trees or talking to birds or whatever the hell he did all the time. I wish—there's so much I would change. God, that day on Tatooine. I didn't know he remembered. I didn't know he was so angry."

"I know, Han. But it's not your fault. Any more than it is mine."

"Yeah, I know that. But if he had trusted me. If he had felt like I knew him. Maybe Snoke wouldn't have got to him so easy."

Leia took a deep breath. "I have blamed you. Sometimes. I never told you. But I have blamed you. And I'm sorry."

Han was silent for a moment. "I've blamed you too. And I'm sorry, too."

"I just wish I knew how Snoke got him to—" Leia stopped.

"I'm not sure there's anything to know," Han said.

"What do you mean?" Leia asked.

"I just mean—maybe it can't be explained. Maybe he didn't even know. Ben, I mean. Maybe he knew it was a mistake right away and felt like—like he couldn't fix it." Han inhaled deeply and whooshed the breath out. "Or maybe…maybe he's just a Skywalker. They only come in two flavors."

"Yeah," Leia sighed. "We do." She put her head on his shoulder and he kissed her braided hair.

"You smell nice," he said. "You've always smelled nice."

She said nothing, but smiled.

"Except when you've been swimming in a trash compactor," he added.

"Nerf herder," she said affectionately, kissed him on the lips, and replaced her head on his shoulder. He shifted her gently to put an arm around her and they sat together feeling sad, but known, and loved.

*

Ren ordered a command shuttle prepared and wondered how he was going to keep Rey from finding out that he was the cause of all of her loneliness and pain.

*

Rey sat in her room, growing the bluish lightning like a spiking, ghostly plant out of her hands. She held out her arms palms-up, as she had held them out to him. She concentrated and it stretched up three, now four feet in the air, crackling and zapping.

A knock at the door.

Rey stared at the lightning and willed the person to go away.

"That isn't going to work anymore, Rey. Open the door." Finn.

Surprised, she lost focus and the lightning vanished. She got up and opened the door.

"You know, I couldn’t figure out why I hadn't seen much of you. I was asking myself why I hadn't been to check on you. I'm a lousy friend, I was thinking. Then, just today, just a few minutes ago, I realized that I have been to check on you, but every time I get close I start to remember something else I want to do. And I figured it out: you're doing that."

Rey didn't answer, but she backed away from the door and let him walk in. He looked angry, and hurt.

"Why would you pull that on me? I'm your friend. And it makes me feel like an idiot that I didn't figure it out before."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Is that it? Do you want to tell me why you would do that to me?"

Rey was silent. She sat down on the bed.

"What has happened to you? Is it what he did?" He came and sat next to her. "Rey, watching him take you—I have never felt worse in my life. I made it out of that place and the first friend I had I thought I'd lost. Then I met you, and I thought I'd lost you, too. Look: I never had anything. No family, no friends. All of us—stormtroopers—we lived together and trained together and sometimes there were laughs—but we were never really friends. Hux made sure we were rotated around a lot so you never got close to anybody. Now I have Poe and the guys here and I thought I had you, too, but I don't understand why you would trick me like that."

It occurred to Rey as her eyes filled that she had cried more in the last few days than at any other time in her life since the first few weeks after her family had abandoned her on Jakku. She had learned quickly that it did no good.

"I'm so sorry, Finn," she whispered.

"Do you want to tell me what's wrong?"

"I don't know how. I don't know how to tell you. You'll hate me."

"Try me."

Apparently, he hadn't heard the rumors. Perhaps they hadn't spread after she had inadvertently choked that man nearly to death. The nicer of the two of them, too, it had occurred to her later. She wiped her face. "Do you—had you ever killed anyone, before the Starkiller explosion?"

He took a deep breath. "That's what this is about?"

He was silent for a moment and she waited. Finn's face looked sadder and more thoughtful than she had yet seen it. It occurred to her that he was gracefully and capably coping with things just as awful as the things that seemed to be eating into her like dry-rot, leaving her unrecognizable to herself.

"Yes," he said finally. "I was on a mission to quell an uprising on Sacorria. And I shot two people. It was the hardest, worst thing I've ever done because I know those people didn't deserve to die. Uprising is the only sane response to the First Order. The mission on Jakku was when I decided I was leaving. I sure as hell wasn't going to—" he broke off.

"What?"

"Nothing. I don't need to tell *you* who he is. Was."

She didn't press Finn for details.

Finn sighed. "If that's what's bothering you, I get it. I just said we weren't friends up there, but—" He paused. "I would have saved them if I could have. If there had been any way." He paused again. "I don't feel good about helping to blow those people up. I mean, the First Order has to be stopped. But I knew those people. I was one of them. It didn't make me happy to kill them."

He was quiet for a moment, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. "Here's the thing, though. What's right and what makes you feel good don't always go together. All those men and women were taken from their families just like me. None of us ever had a choice. They wouldn't have been there on that base if it wasn't for General Hux."

Was everyone insane? "How does that make it better?" she demanded loudly. "So they were dragged away from their families. No friends. Never any chance to live the way they wanted to live. And now they're dead. How does that make it better?"

Finn leaned close to her and took her hands. "It doesn't make it better. But it means that their blood isn't really on our hands, Rey. Don't you see that?"

Her hands felt coated, gloved, with blood. How could he not feel it? "No," she whispered.

Finn shook his head. "You didn't do anything wrong. Do you want the First Order to rule the galaxy? You want another Starkiller Base? We're in a war." He squeezed her hands. "And like it or not, those troops were lost in the struggle. The First Order—it's evil. I know. I grew up in it. I was trained by it. You did. The right. Thing. And I think it's good that it's hard, because it means you give a damn. But you can't take on the death of every enemy soldier. It'll kill you."

Lost in the struggle? Where had she heard that before? Rey knew the words ought to mean something to her, but her mind seemed filled to capacity with the image of Kylo Ren lying unconscious on the floor as she left him. She saw a wall of blinding light in the hall outside, igniting confused, frightened stormtroopers, men and women whose last thoughts were of—what? What love? The light incinerated the walls, illuminating the dark room in a terrible flash and then set his body alight. Like the burning man from her dreams, she thought, with a start. Had he awakened briefly? Had he thought of her for a split-second before the fire gobbled him, evaporated him into empty space? She put her head in her hands and tried to make the image disappear.

"Rey?"

"I'm okay," she said quickly.

"Mmm, I don't believe you," Finn replied.

"I just need some time. This is all so much, so fast." she said.

"Hey—of course." Finn sounded relieved. "You're not a soldier. You just got caught up in all this. Nobody wants to take other people's lives; of course you're upset. It's going to be okay. It's just going to take time. I'm just so relieved that it wasn't—him. That he didn't hurt you. He's a goddamned monster, Rey. Taking him out—" he paused. "That was everything."

Rey didn't answer. A goddamned monster. Lost in the struggle: that's where she had heard it before. She felt cool and calm. How deluded she had been.

Finn looked at her curiously. "How did you get away from him, anyway?"

"I knocked him unconscious."

Finn looked amazed. "What—with the Force? You can do that?"

"No," she said coolly. "I fucked him. I wanted him, and I'm such a sweet lay that I fucked him unconscious. Then I left him to burn to death."

Finn froze. His face registered shock and horror, no less at the crudeness of her speech, she thought scornfully, than at its content. "You what?"

She stood, pulling her hands away, and spoke slowly. "You had just walked out the door of Maz Kanata's. MY first friend. You left me." Speaking these words, Rey felt the opening of a new, strange chamber in her heart. "Like my parents."

She had waited so faithfully, so trustingly: why? Regardless of why they hadn't returned, the hard bleak fact remained that they had left. Thick, viscous rage slithered from the chamber like an eel, exploring, nudging, tweaking memories, changing perceptions.

Finn stood up. "I *almost* left. There's a difference! I came back for you!"

She nodded and nodded. "Yes. Lucky you and Han showed up with explosives and the entire Resistance. With your help, I killed the only person in the galaxy who ever wanted me."

Finn's mouth was open but speechless.

"All of his power, all of his devotion, laid at my feet. And I repaid him with death."

As she spoke, she turned her palms upward and the blue lightning spiked into the air. The ceiling began to scorch.

Finn jumped back and gasped. "Rey! I am your friend! I'm sorry I got scared—but I came back for you! And he—I don't know what he said to you, but—" he looked up, where orange flames were licking along the ceiling, gaining speed. "Rey, he's a murderer."

"The Light side kills too," said Rey. "We just pretend it doesn't matter if the person wears a mask." She closed her palms and the lightning vanished.

Flames were caressing the tops of the walls. Smoke was filling the air and Finn coughed, ran three steps to the door and yanked it open. He ducked down to avoid the smoke and shouted, "Get out of here!"

She smiled slightly and shot her hand toward the open door. "Watch."

*

Leia was walking down the gym corridor toward the bathrooms; as she came closer she could hear shouting and exclamations of astonishment. She quickened her pace and as she entered the bathroom she saw both a melee and its source: one of the showers was turned on and the water, instead of dropping into the drain, was flowing out of the stall, across the floor, and out the quarters-side door into the hallway. She watched, astonished, as someone tried to shut it off and was rewarded with a shock of bluish lightning. 

*

Rey saw Finn looking around wildly for a few seconds, then he stood staring down the corridor, transfixed. He leapt back out of the doorway as a shallow river flowed through the door and began spreading itself up the walls and across the ceiling, extinguishing the flames with a snaky hiss and enclosing Rey in a flowing, undulating cube of water. The water absorbed the smoke, swirled, and turned dark.

*

"Sir? We're approaching D'Qar."

*

Rey willed the darkened water to flow back where it came from and spill itself down the drain where it ought to have gone in the first place. It withdrew down the hall and Finn moved back to the doorway and stared, his face drawn.

"Don't do this," he said. "Rey, please. Whatever happened, however you feel, we can get through it. You cared about him? Okay. You feel guilty? I understand. And I am sorry about what happened on Takodana. I'm sorry I tried to walk out, and I'm sorry I couldn't protect you. But Rey, I was so afraid to go back there. So afraid of him. Doesn't it mean anything that I came for you?"

The cool feeling was wavering. Rey didn't want it to; the anger and the power felt so much better than grief and guilt, and she didn't know what was going to happen next. The General would not take kindly to her burning and soaking her quarters.

What happened next was an alarm sounding, and at first Rey thought it was a strangely delayed fire alarm. But it was followed by a command given over the loudspeaker: "All personnel, forward ground defense. Repeat: forward ground defense. This is not a drill."

Suddenly, Rey felt strange: as if something was calling to her, or emerging, from someplace very deep or very far away. Without pausing or waiting for Finn, she hurried toward the front of the barracks along with everyone else: tens and hundreds running, shouting, pulling on flak jackets and shouldering weapons.

"Rey!" Finn's voice came from behind her but she ignored it, the calling in her mind growing stronger, more vivid. She could scarcely believe what it told her. How? How?

Rey burst through the door to see a First Order command shuttle sitting outside the Resistance base. How had it gotten through the air defenses? Just as oddly, no one had emerged. The ship just sat there, and the Resistance fighters arrayed themselves around it, weapons drawn.

She walked out toward the ship.

Ignoring the shouted commands for her to get out of the line of fire, she stopped in front of the closed ramp and her heart thudded painfully when it started to descend. She quickly looked down and did not raise her eyes until the ramp touched the ground. She walked her eyes slowly up the textured surface to the top.

Again came the tears, and her hand flew to her mouth.

The masked, cloaked man at the top of the ramp stood motionless for a moment, then extended his hand.

Rey took a step, then heard a voice shouting her name: the General's voice. She stopped walking but didn't turn around, unwilling to look away from Kylo Ren. "Rey! What's happening? Who is—" her words ended in a jagged gasp. "Ben?" she whispered.

"Ben Solo is dead," said Rey flatly, and she walked up the ramp.

*

Leia stood motionless as the shuttle took off, accompanied into the sky by a shower of blaster fire. Those things never hit anything, she thought numbly.


	7. Chapter 7

The command shuttle had only a pilot and a small complement of guards, but Ren didn't want to speak until he was certain they would be alone. His heart was pounding as he led her silently through the small ship. She felt different. Much stronger; she seemed to be smoldering with power. But Darker power. He felt an enormous, dizzying wave of triumph and fierce joy. She was turning.

He'd had a room prepared for her but he realized immediately that he wasn't going to take her to it. He led her to his own quarters and the door closed behind them. He took off his mask and faced her.

"The last time I saw you," he said, without preamble, "You were writhing beneath my hips. I imagine the last time you saw me I was unconscious on the floor. You left me there and blew up my base."

*

Rey could scarcely keep her knees from buckling when she saw his face. The terrible mask could just as easily have hidden a ghost. But it was really him: alive.

"You should have left me in the forest," she replied viciously, eyes streaming, and pushed him towards the bed. He didn't argue, on either point.

*

Afterwards, Ren held her tightly.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "You wanted my devotion? My love? You have them."

She was evidently a quick study: he felt her Pulling him into herself.

When he opened his eyes, they were standing, clothed and side-by-side, on a scuffed and dented metal floor. It struck him as familiar, but he was unable to concentrate on remembering where he might have seen it because filling his field of vision, in the space where it seemed like walls and ceiling should have enclosed them, there was only the night sky. But not exactly the night sky: a wrung-out, faded, flickering black—rather like the color of his grandfather's charred helm, he thought grimly—interrupted by a few dim stars.

"Is this…you?" he asked, bewildered. Her blue sky, replaced by dinged old steel and sooty darkness? He wanted desperately for her to turn, needed her firmly on his side before she learned the truth about his part in her exile, so he could not account for the sadness he felt, nor for the relief when she smiled and shook her head slightly: no. "Look closer," she said. He did, and then he saw them: walls behind the sky, walls at the edge of the universe, battered like the floor. For a moment he felt as if he had gone mad, but then, suddenly, the shape of the room, supplied perhaps by his own, much stronger if more distant memory of it, snapped into focus.

"The Falcon," he said. It was a memory.

Rey stretched out an arm. She pointed at one star, then another, and another, and as she did so, they lit up, one by one, candles in a ritual. When six were alight, she turned to him and kissed him.

"This is proof," she said.

"Proof of what?"

"Of my loyalty."

"I don't understand."

"Don't you see?" She pointed at the drunkard's walk of stars and a thin line burned from one to the next to the next. "This is a memory. Of something I saw. A map."

*

Ren stood on the bridge of the shuttle with Rey next to him. He stood still, cloaked and masked, and felt uneasy. Would she falter when he struck down Skywalker? She might be shadowed now; he remembered very well the feeling: a sense of foreboding, a coldness, a turning inward, a fascination with controlling the Force instead of simply feeling it. But the great cruelty, the unforgivable act: this was yet to come. She had left him on the Starkiller, but, of course, he hadn't died.

This struck him suddenly as a potentially fatal flaw in his thinking about the whole matter and he wished, not for the first time, for his grandfather's gravitas, his cold intelligence. The look on her face when she saw him at the top of the shuttle's ramp; her rebuke of his mother; the way she had not tried to apologize, knowing that apologies meant nothing, had simply given herself to him: these told him everything he'd needed to know about how she had felt about leaving him, how she had felt believing that she'd killed him. She loved him fiercely now, he felt sure. But, he thought miserably, love never turned anybody to the Dark side. If he had stayed dead to her, she might have made a truly fearsome Knight of Ren. But as things actually stood, he could not be sure of anything yet.

They dropped through the atmosphere into shifting, skating mist that alternated with sunshine. Soon the shuttle was flying low over a sparkling blue sea, skimming over an archipelago of small green-leafed islands that seemed to stretch for leagues, with no continents in sight.

"He's here," said Ren to the pilot. "I can feel him. Just a little further."

Rey shifted her weight slightly towards him so their arms were pressed together, then she moved away again. She did not try to hold his hand or visibly touch him outside his quarters, seeming to understand that this would make him appear weak in front of his crew.

His own hands, however, itched with wanting to hold hers, and this was a source of a deeper unease. He had thought that once she had turned, or at least was on her way to turning, that he would feel secure, strong, invincible. Instead he felt as if he were falling away from himself, losing his sense of mission, wanting only to be alone with her someplace where no one would ever bother them. He clenched his fists to stay in control.

A mountainous island, one that had been visible in the distance for some time, at last loomed in front of them and the pilot swung the shuttle gracefully around it. Emerging into a new vista, both of them gasped. There, in the distance but directly in front of them, was the island. Frosted with green and bathed in sunlight—but unmistakably, his island.

*

Luke Skywalker, bearded and cloaked, watched the shuttle descend and knew both its occupants long before it had landed on the tiny, rocky island, lapped on all sides by a blue-grey sea filled with fat, speckled fish. He felt only grief, like a soft rain. Ben. With the girl, Naya. 

*

"How?" she asked him quietly. "How can this be here?"

"I don't know. Maybe because he trained me? Maybe somehow…" his voice trailed off. He had no explanation.

Rey shook her head. "It's not just that. I never told you. I have imagined this island, almost every night since I was abandoned on Jakku. I—I imagine being there with my sister. We're together, and we talk and swim and—" she stopped, feeling self-conscious. "When I saw it inside you…" her thought went uncompleted as well. She stared out the window. The island was rocky but green, and the ocean looked fresh and clean and it sparkled in the sun. His grey rock and inky ocean suddenly seemed less beautiful, a barren copy of something she now knew to exist in glowing, vibrant reality. This thought was rewarded with a sharp stab of guilt.

To compensate, she took his hand and felt strengthened by its warmth. He stiffened slightly and she started to pull her hand away, knowing he would not want to hold hands on the bridge of his command shuttle. But he held on, tightly. "Don't let go," he said, seeming not to care if his pilot heard him.

"I won't," she said. "Not ever." She hoped desperately that she could keep this promise.

"This is the one," he said to the pilot. "Put us down wherever it's flattest. As high as you can get us. And don't leave the ship. No matter what happens."

"Yes, sir."

"You don't have to do anything," he said to her as they landed, an odd, almost panicked note in his voice. "You don't have to leave the ship, either."

"No," she said. "I'm coming with you." She paused, then said, "But take off your mask. He knows who you are."

*

Luke walked out to meet the shuttle. He wasn't afraid of Ben—which is not to say he believed he could defeat him. Watching his former apprentice stride down the ramp of the shuttle with the girl (now a lovely young woman) that he, Luke, had hoped so desperately—and failed—to protect, he understood fully and at last the look on old Obi-Wan's face when Vader struck him down: he felt at peace with whatever was to come.

"Ben," he said calmly. "And I suppose you still go by 'Rey'?"

The girl looked at him with genuine bafflement. "What other name would I go by?"

"I assume Ben—"

"My name is not Ben." His voice, still dark and melodic as Luke remembered it, betrayed resentment, but also panic. Luke regarded him for a moment and understood.

"I see. He has not told you."

"Told me what? What are we talking about?"

"Why have you come here?" Luke asked Rey. "With him?"

Rey was confused. She hadn't known what would happen when they landed, but they'd been on the island for only a minute and already she felt mired in something she didn't understand. Luke Skywalker spoke in riddles. "I'm here with him because I love him."

Luke's mouth twitched down a little at the corner, marking a strange combination of amusement and sadness.

"Yes. I can see that. But why are you here with him? How did he know where to find me?"

The girl looked faint, as if she were speaking words that belonged to someone else. "I—I saw a section of the map that you left behind. I gave it to him."

"Why?"

"Because I love him; I told you."

Luke nodded. "And you know what he intends to do? You understand that he means to kill me?"

The girl looked positively sick. "Yes," she whispered.

"Are you going to help him?"

She could not answer. She stood clutching Ben's hand as if it were the only thing keeping her afloat in a flood.

He smiled slightly again, just a twitch. "Then let me tell you, at least, what reason you might have to want to kill me."

*

Ren could not move or think. He had no options, no recourse. If he pulled out his saber and fought Skywalker now, she would press him for information: what had he meant? Why hadn't he been allowed to finish speaking? Eventually, she would be strong enough to get the information from him whether he gave it willingly or not. And then she would hate him. He saw now what should have been obvious to greatest idiot in the galaxy: he should have sought out her family first. With her family returned to her, by him, she wouldn't care—at least, not as much—that he was the reason she had been parted from them in the first place. He had been exultant when she gave him the map freely, uncoaxed: he had ordered an immediate course change and then had given himself over completely to the pleasure of holding her while she slept. He hadn't wanted to sleep because he couldn't bear to dream about his grandfather burning while she was in his arms. He'd just held her, inhaling the air that hovered just above her skin, scarcely able to believe that he possessed her at last.

He saw his folly now, but of course, *now* it was too late. Skywalker would admit to his part in her exile without hesitation. He would not be afraid of her anger. He would not be ruined by her hatred.

*

"What are you talking about?" asked Rey. "I've never met you. What could you possibly have done to make me want to kill you?"

"An interesting question, given your plans."

Rey felt increasingly afraid. Believing she had killed Ren, witnessing the failure of everyone on the Light side to mourn his loss, she had hated them and loved him, with equal, thunderous, power. But now, faced with this kind-looking man: she felt his life, his aliveness, acutely. He was real, and she had given up his location to someone who wanted to kill him. She fought back her panic. "What—just tell me what you're talking about," she said.

"I am responsible for your exile on Jakku—partly. Partly responsible."

Rey seemed to feel the motion of the planet through space, swinging around its sun at breathtaking speed. "What?"

"You were brought to me as a very young, very gifted child. But before you could be trained—" he paused and looked meaningfully at Ren, "My apprentices were massacred. I was afraid I couldn't protect you. I told your parents to hide you. Somewhere far away, somewhere isolated, where no one would ever think to look. We arranged to hide you on Jakku, paid Unkar Plutt—quite handsomely—to keep an eye on you. We stationed another man, Lor San Tekka, on the planet, to watch you from a distance and ensure your safety. And we gave you a new name: 'Rey.'"

Plutt had been paid to watch out for her? Why had he never given her enough to eat? And who was this other man, who had known her and watched her but never appeared to her, never offered to be a surrogate parent or even a friend during the endless, terrifying first weeks of her exile, or at any time in the past fifteen years? Her parents had agreed to all of this?

Rey felt as if reality was ballooning in and out, changing shape unpredictably. And, she felt, there were worse things, terrible things, outside the expanding and contracting bubble, creeping along in the slippery film.

"What was my name before?"

"Naya. Your name is Naya."

A tooth, sharp, protruding from slimy gums, eating a hole into the bubble. "No. That's my sister's name. My sister was little when I was left. I mean, close to my age. But I remember. Naya. She loved to sing."

Luke looked genuinely surprised, then deeply sad. "I'm sorry, Rey. You loved to sing; I remember that about you. You are remembering a name, and a happy little girl. But they are both you. You don't have a sister."

*

Ren put a hand on her back as she swayed, but at his touch she started away from him. He felt himself go cold.

"I don't have a sister," she said, her voice raspy. She coughed and stumbled a few steps. She was silent. Ren's heart was pounding.

And then, as if in slow motion, she turned to Luke. "Why did this happen to me? Who massacred your apprentices?"

*

"My nephew," said Luke quietly, still fearing nothing but believing he might be speaking his last words. "Ben Solo."

*

Why, Rey wondered slowly, numbly, had it never occurred to her to ask where all the Jedi were? She looked at the man whose hand she had promised to hold, always. She croaked out, "The Jedi, and many more, will be lost in the struggle." Then she turned away from both men and vomited. Her stomach would not stop contracting even after its contents had all been propulsively expelled; she felt as if her body were trying to expel him as well, overcompensating for having vomited only a few weeks ago at the thought that she'd killed him. After a minute she felt Luke's hand on her back and instantly, her sickness vanished and was replaced with the cool feeling, but it was not calm this time. It felt electric, tinged at the edges with a crackling, like a lightning storm in the distance, approaching fast. She turned and with a quick shove, pushed him away as well.

"DAMN YOU! SKYWALKERS!" she bellowed. "You just storm through the galaxy wrecking everything!" She looked at Ren. "Liar! MURDERER!" She looked at Luke. "And you! You abandoned me in the desert because you're too cowardly to face your own evil blood!" She looked from one to the other and shouted. "The galaxy would have been better off if NONE of you had ever been born!"

Luke looked as if he had expected her to say this, and seemed to feel that he deserved it. Ren was immobile, too stunned even to clench his fists. In that moment, she hated them both with every tiny fighting piece of herself, every little scrap of herself that had worked to keep her alive all those years. She turned, faced the ocean, and raised both arms, palms out. Then she let out a huge, terrible cry and the blue lightning snapped from her hands in webs a quarter of a mile long. They set the closest island alight, and the flames were cruel and incongruous in the sunshine.

*

Abruptly, she stopped yelling, extinguished the lightning, and turned to him with an expression of animal savagery. In a mocking tone, she shouted, "WATCH!"

She shot a hand out towards the ocean. She can't do that, he thought. Nobody can do that. It was an illu—

His thought died before it came fully into being. Because a tall wave, lurching and translucent and blue-green, was rising out of the ocean, a real ocean, to smother the flames on the burning island. The hissing was loud and angry and the smoke polluted the air.

*

Rey let the water go as soon as the fire was extinguished. She felt exhausted, and wished she could go someplace alone and cry until she simply evaporated. All these years, believing that someday she would be reunited with Naya. It was as if Naya had died, and she supposed that she had. If she, Rey, was Naya, then sweet, singing Naya had died long ago and only Rey remained: hard, scavenging, surviving Rey.

Suddenly it struck her that however much she might hate them at this moment, the men standing with her on the island were probably the only two people in the galaxy who understood how she felt. What strange and awful company she now kept.

"Did you know?" she asked, without turning around.

Ren understood. Of course he did. "Not until after the Starkiller." His voice sounded odd. She turned around to see both of them looking as if they had just seen someone reanimate a corpse, or create a real burning star out of a handful of sugar. "What?" she said, passing her hand across her forehead. "I used the Force, obviously."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Luke, who looked surprised to find himself still breathing and standing, said, "Rey? What happens now? I think you decide."

"Why do I decide?" she said wearily.

"Well," he said, rubbing his bearded chin. "Ordinarily I would expect a light saber battle right about now. But I'm not sure what that would accomplish. Besides," he said, gesturing at the still-smoking island, "I fear that the two of us combined could not defeat you if you decided to fight us."

She made a dismissive sound. "He can do that, too," she said, glancing at Ren. "He can raise the ocean all the way to the sky."

"No, I can't," Ren said shortly. "You forget. We were inside my mind. That wasn't real."

It wasn't real.

"The hell it wasn't," she snapped. "I know what's real and—" she stopped. Of course she didn't know what was real. Her sister wasn't real. And the man she thought she loved was a brutal, cold-blooded killer. Though—hadn't she known that? And—"Aren't I, too?" she said aloud. Their confusion showed on their faces.

"I as good as killed you," she said to Ren. Maybe you've killed more people. Maybe you killed them face to face. But I took your body because I wanted you and then I left you. And I placed the charges: plunk," she said, gesturing with her hand to imitate the sticking of the charge. "And then, having learned nothing from that, apparently, I gave up to you the location of a man you wanted to kill. Are we really that different?"

She looked at Luke. "You loved someone you knew was a killer. Are we really that different?" 

Neither man seemed to know what to say.

"Not exactly philosophers, are you? Aren't the Jedi supposed to—oh, to hell with it."

She turned away again and stared out at the smoking island until finally Luke spoke. "I'm sorry, Rey. I'm sorry I ran from Ben. I'm sorry I left you there, alone, for so long. I'm sorry."

"Apologies are meaningless," said Ren.

"Not if you feel them," said Luke.

"What do you mean by that?" Rey asked Ren, turning around.

"Some things aren't forgivable."

"Is what I did to you forgivable?" she asked.

He was silent, looking at the ground.

"Look at me. Do you forgive me?"

She stepped closer to him. "Look at me." He did. Her voice softened progressively as she spoke. "I will regret what I did for as long as I live. I took your love and I left you and if luck or fate hadn't intervened, I would have killed you. And I'm sorry, Kylo. Whatever you've done, to me or anyone else, whatever you are, I will always be sorry that I did that to you. Forgive me. Please forgive me."

"No one has ever called me that before," he said.

"That's your name," she said. 

"I don't know my name," he mumbled.

"What?"

"There is nothing to forgive," he said. "You did the right thing. When you left me. I am—I am unforgivable. It would have been better if I had died."

Rey stared at him and felt as if she had broken through walls that weren't meant to be broken, walls that surrounded a world governed by ordinary rules and ordinary events. But the reality of her life was now on the other side of these walls, whether she liked it or not. She had to pick her way through this new world as best she could, and while she felt that she ought to hate him and it was entirely reasonable for her to hate him, she honestly wasn't sure if she did or not. Hatred seemed exhausting, an impossible effort. She opened her mouth and flung her trust into whatever words chose to come out.

"If you feel that way," she said, "then come home."

*

"I can't," he said, his voice breaking to match the breaking he felt inside himself. How could she still care for him?

"Why not?"

"Don't you understand?" he said, his voice jerky, tears beginning to spill down his face. "I'm caught. The Dark side is a trap. All the shit the Jedi say about fear and anger—none of that matters. Everyone is afraid, everyone is angry." He held up a trembling finger. "One. Unforgivable. Act. And then—" he gestured broadly and Rey recognized it as Han's ironic gesture. "Then it doesn't matter. Beyond forgiveness is the wasteland. The bodies multiply," he said, his face contorting with grief, tears falling unchecked, "Like maggots on flesh. That is the snare. That is the Dark side. There is no forgiveness. Only Darkness. There is no coming back." He turned and walked away from her, stumbled blindly into a rock wall and dropped to the ground, not caring that he was dizzy and his head was now throbbing. He wished that he would fly apart into pieces.

Then, her voice, clear and soft. "You're a coward. Like your uncle. And like me."

He lifted his head. "What?"

"My friend, Finn—FN-whatever you called him—he didn't fall apart, like me. And you. He lived and fought alongside all those people on Starkiller base and he didn't fall apart because he helped kill them. And I thought for awhile it was because he didn't care about them enough, but I know now that it's because he isn't afraid to know what he's guilty of. He doesn't take the blame for what he hasn't done but he admits to himself what he has done. He…answers to himself. He's a good man. A really, really good man. Better than you. Well, obviously. God—much better than you! Really, no one is not better than you." He said nothing, because at this point he did not disagree.

She cleared her throat as if she felt herself getting off-track. "But even though I have every reason to hate you I don't seem to have the energy and for some—god, some stupid, insane reason I care what happens to you. Maybe it's because I like your parents. Or because—" she stopped again, and continued more slowly. "Maybe it's because I don't think Ben Solo is dead, actually. I think I may have met him, on an island that looks a lot like this. I think—I think I might have loved him there, just for a little while, but maybe it's enough." He closed his eyes and saw her in his mind, blue, blue, blue sky and Light forever. How to explain such a person?

She continued, "So you have to stop running away. You have to face what you're guilty of. You have to ask forgiveness, for all of it, so you can come home. To your parents. With me."

At last he shifted, still on the ground, to face her. "How?" he said hollowly. "How do I ask? They're all dead."

She sat down and took his hand. "Figures in the mist," she said cryptically. "Ghosts. Come with me," and she Pushed into him, all the way in to the island.

*

But when they opened their eyes, they saw that the island was not the same. This island had sprouted a light covering of lichen and other small green plants, like the real island—but it was also cut in places by deep, smoking fissures. The ocean looked muddy and viscous, seething; it was moving restlessly, and the glittering specks looked more like malevolent eyes than little diamond-scaled fish.

"It's time to look beneath the surface," she said, helping him to his feet.

He stared at her for a long moment and then, looking out to the horizon, extended his hand toward the sea. His arm shook. "My name is Ben Solo," he said, grief cracking in his voice. "I will look at you now."

The ocean began to bubble and shake. And then out of the murky water they came, rising straight up, dripping, motionless: dead, multiple millions of dead. Battalions of stormtroopers stood straight at attention for miles and miles. But the crowd was composed mostly of ordinary men, women, children, of various species, arrayed around the island, packed shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and stretching all the way to the horizon in every direction. They rose until their dead feet dangled just above the surface of the ocean, which had turned a sickly, miasmic yellow.

Closest to the island, and arrayed around it in a circle, were sixteen young people holding glowing light sabers.

The ghosts, or whatever they were, gazed up, down, into the distance, some at each other, none at him.

*

Rey had been confident, assured that she could turn him back, bring him home. But now she faltered. She'd had no idea. Not even an inkling. So many. God, so many. Children. She felt ill, rinsed with sick, but her stomach was round and empty as a hollow moon. She scanned their faces, those she could see, and they were not blank, anonymous ghosts. Each was a person, an individual. She got the feeling that he knew each person that he'd killed. "How?" she asked.

"The Starkiller," he said. He seemed dazed, blank. "I have struck people down with my own hand. Ordered troops into battles they should not have been fighting. The day your friend defected I ordered an entire village massacred. Men, women, children. On Jakku. He refused. Did he tell you that?"

She shook her head. If he had….

He wasn't looking at her but didn't wait for her to speak. "It was so easy," he continued, his voice flat. "I gave the order. They followed it. It was…new. A new depth. So efficient. No one entirely to blame."

She opened her mouth and again he seemed aware of her expression without looking at her. "Of course I am to blame."

Then he started: the ghosts had moved. Their heads, and eyes. Eyes, millions of pairs of eyes, had shifted, focused, were now boring into him. She saw his breathing accelerate, saw the fear in his face. Wanting at that moment to be anywhere else, with anyone else, feeling that if she touched him her hand would turn slick, dead and grey, Rey took a deep breath and took his hand. She had brought him here. She wouldn't abandon him now.

His hand didn't close around hers, but at her touch he immediately resumed speaking. "But most of these people died in the only activation of the Starkiller. I didn't order the strike. But I failed to break Hux's worthless neck before he could give the order. I had the power to bring peace to the galaxy and I refused. Out of cowardice."

He stopped and looked momentarily stunned, seeming to understand what he'd said only after he'd spoken the words, but he soon continued. "I felt them: billions screamed and then were snuffed out. They crowded into my mind, joining the rest. Becoming slime, and bones. I fed on them, pulled from them to gain more power." He paused. "There are," he said, "so many."

"I—I meant how can you see them all like this? And—are they really here?" She shivered a little.

"The Force. I feel—I know—every life I've taken. And—no, they are not really here. They are…imprints. Echoes. I know them. But these people are gone. Dead. Because I killed them. Or I allowed the First Order to kill them."

"But how—why—why did you keep doing it? Why didn't you stop before it came to this?" She tried to keep horror, disgust, fear, despair from her voice, not wanting to communicate these things to him, afraid that he would decide at the last moment to hurl her from his mind, drown the echoes again and burn down the galaxy to hide from the pain.

"Only the first time needs a reason." He paused. "There is no peace in freedom. The only real peace comes in submission to one strong enough to crush the predators and thieves that terrorize the little lives of ordinary men and women. The Jedi, and many more, will be lost in the struggle. Mourn their loss if you must. But know that you are bringing peace to the next generation. They will live and work in a world that is safe for all who obey." He stopped, and looked at her for the first time since the figures had arisen. He looked as if he had been hollowed, as if the expulsion of the dead from his internal ocean had left him fragile like an eggshell. "Only the first time needs a reason," he said again. "After that, each time it's the same. You keep doing it to convince yourself you were right every time you did it before. To stop is impossible. To stop is to risk—"

"Risk what?"

"Annihilation."

She took a deep breath. "No. Ask them to forgive you."

He turned toward her and just looked, for a long time. She got the sense that he knew something and was choosing not to tell her.

"What?" she asked. "What is it?"

He pulled his hand from hers and touched her face gently. Then he turned back to the legion of dead and walked a few steps forward, to the edge of the cliff where they stood.

"Forgive me," he said uncertainly.

The dead were motionless, but they stared and stared at him.

"Forgive me," he whispered.

As one, the figures raised their right arms, palms facing the island.

"Forgive me," he cried, terror and surrender in his voice.

Every palm began to glow and crackle with blue lightning.

"Forgive me!" he shouted brokenly, falling to his knees.

From every dead hand, a tree of blue lightning burst. The branching, snapping webs filled the sky and then they struck him, encircled him, and felled him so that he lay bent at angles, face staring at the sky. For a split second there was a profound, uncanny silence—or maybe Rey only thought there was; maybe she simply wasn't ready yet and her mind pushed a moment into a crevice where no moment existed anywhere else, for anyone else. At the sunset of that moment, the closing of everything that had come before, his body convulsed and the screaming began.

Rey staggered back and clutched at her ears but it didn't muffle the sound even one bit, a sound like a thousand devils boiling in a holy fire. But not devils, after all: Rey heard anguish, regret, unspeakable sorrow. They weaved and sliced through the hoarse shrieks of pain like awful choral harmonies, a lamentation that bespoke agony well beyond physical pain. The lightning did not affect her at all, but he shook and screamed and the tireless arms supported untrembling hands from which the cruel blue jagged vines gushed relentlessly.

"Stop!" she yelled. "Stop this! It's enough! It's enough!"

He could not hear her, and she despaired until she heard a massive splash behind her and when she whirled around, despair turned to terror. Unnoticed, the fissures in the island had widened and deepened and one huge piece of rock had sheared off into the yellow sea. The echoes were beginning to flicker now but the lightning continued unabated—

A tremor shook the rock and threw her, hard, to the ground, opening a chasm behind her, only inches from her sprawled body. She saw now that the island was the seat of his Dark power, the unforgivable act lodged in his mind, the bleak and barren inversion of Skywalker's peaceful refuge. She didn't know what would replace it, but she knew she had to get out before she fell with it into the seething, sick-colored ocean.

But what about him? She didn't know the rules here, didn't know the system: what would happen to him if she pulled away and left him? Would he be trapped in the agony of his own remorse forever, wails of pain shooting through the streams of the Force for all time? She had to pull him out—then everything would be okay, he could go home, she would come with him and maybe—

She didn't complete the thought. Instead, she sprang up, and, shielding her eyes from the blinding light, lunged forward into the blue blaze. For a second the pain was a shock through every atom, but the grief wasn't hers and the hurt vanished instantly. She grabbed his hand and pulled and felt the swooping feeling drawing them both out, she hoped, to safety.

*

By now Ben felt only popping, melting, bursting clouds of pain; he heard a scream like a live animal being gutted and he thought he might be producing it. He vaguely remembered feeling sad, more than sad, sadder than he had ever felt, just a minute ago. But now there was only pain, pure and searing: would it be forever? He couldn't remember what had happened before the pain. Maybe he had always been this way: maybe he was nothing but pain.

He could just barely see someone through the fire. Whoever it was did not move to help him.

But then, suddenly, he felt a hand close around his, and a swooping feeling, and then he was muffled, covered in black fabric, being patted all over.

Had the burning stopped? The pain had not stopped. The pain, he felt sure, would separate him atom by atom until he dissolved into nothingness; he imagined ashes of himself floating, floating up into the sky. Maybe the pain would diminish then, over years or light years, maybe he could slip quietly into the sweet cold universe, all feather-light carbon and freedom from pain.

But now he thought he heard a woman sobbing and heard her desperate voice: was it Her, speaking though her throat was slit, sobbing through the clouds of flies?

"What happened? Why did this happen? There was lightning, and screaming—but it was all in his mind! It wasn't real!"

And a man's voice, quiet but quick: "It was real to him. Ben always understood this about the Force. It works by suggestion—he—"

"What are you talking about?" the woman screamed. "Why did this happen? Why is he dying?"

"His body didn't know that he wasn't really burning. Let's get him to the shuttle."

"Why didn't you help him? We have to save him! I have to save him!"

A pause, and he felt his body being lifted, up, closer to the sun, closer to the blue sky: he was an offering, a sacrifice, and the Light took him and surrounded him and said, Yes, welcome home, welcome Ben, welcome home.

Then the man's voice: "You already have."

 

Epilogue

Rey walked from Bunker 3 to the usual place by the ravine. It was dark, and the sky was cloudless and frothy with starlight.

Ben was sitting on the rock already, hooded and cloaked against the chill in the color she had come to think of as "Jedi brown." She sat down next to him wordlessly. She could hear him breathing through the device he still used, which the medical droids thought might no longer be needed in a few months, once his lungs had fully healed. He turned toward her. "They finished it," he said.

She looked at the mask that fully covered his face except for his eyes: a dull gold, etched with black in a pattern that resembled feathers. Down the middle, hiding the respirator, was a long piece suggesting a sharp beak. "A hawk?" she asked.

"A falcon," he replied.

She smiled and took his hand, squeezing it warmly as she often did. "Of course. I love it."

Maybe it was hearing her speak that word: later he would be at a loss to explain why he chose that night, that time, to loosen her grip so that he could play gently with her hands, his heart beating faster as he traced her fingers slowly with his own. He had not touched her this way since returning to himself, since becoming a new self, since she had brought him through the fire.

Their quiet friendship—deeper than friendship, but what else to call it?—had begun as soon as he opened his eyes in the medical bunker on D'Qar, grateful beyond words that he could see at all, to find her sitting, just watching him, apparently unperturbed by the sight of his catastrophic, disfiguring burns and holding his newly attached artificial hand. "I told you I wouldn't let go," was the first thing she'd said. Then: "Your parents are here." And then, with a smile that he felt did more to speed his recovery than anything the spidery droids were doing with their liniments and surgeries and instruments: "So are mine."

She had not been sure what she felt, or what he felt, and there had been no reason to force the issue. Now she felt her pulse accelerate, felt warmth spread through her. He was still recovering from the massive injuries and would be for some time, but she wished he would heal, right now, immediately, so she could pull away the mask and the respirator beneath it and kiss him.

"I know I shouldn't say it," he said, "I don't know if you—but I wish I could kiss you."

Her heart skipped. "Soon," she said, lacing her fingers together with his.

His breath caught. There was something. She felt something, still. Or something new.

"I won't be the same," he said.

"Don't you think that's for the best?" she asked, her voice light.

He was quiet.

"I shouldn't have teased, Ben. I'm sorry. I know you meant the way you look. They've said the grafts will help a lot. Besides, I don't care about that. I know why you have those scars."

"You can say anything you want to me," he said. "But I shouldn't have touched you that way. I can't ask you for more than you've already given me. I can't ask you to bind yourself to me. You don't have to worry about—what I might do. I'm free now. I can live. I can make amends for what I've done. I'm free, because of you. I want you to know that you're free, too."

"I do know," she said.

"I don't deserve—" he started.

"Stop," she interrupted, gently.

She led his gloved hand to her lips and kissed it, held it there for a time, then brought it back to rest in her lap. With her other hand she pointed upwards at the infinite black sky, open and airless and uncontrolled, populated at every depth by glittering specks, like tiny creatures armored in diamonds.

"You still see only the darkness," she said. "Look at the stars."


End file.
